Wednesday 29 January 2014

Allergy to Originality

In this animated Op-Doc by Drew Christie, two men discuss whether anything is truly original — especially in movies and books.

Written, directed and illustrated by Drew Christie; presented by The New York Times Op-Docs.

In creating this Op-Doc animation, I copied well-known images and photographs, retraced innumerable drawings, then photocopied them as a way to underscore the un-originality of the entire process.

My film is chock-full of unlabeled images that make cultural, artistic and literary references. Additionally, the two main characters are modeled to look like the Russian filmmakers Andrei Tarkovsky and Sergei Eisenstein. I hope this piece is at least unoriginal in an original way or perhaps even originally unoriginal.
  ~Drew Christie
An official selection of the 2014 Sundance Film Festival.



1 comment:

Unknown said...

I had to look up what an op-doc was. Opinionated documentary. And where did I find that out? You guessed it, Wikipedia.

The thesis of this op-doc is negative in the extreme. It makes its own criticism when it says someone making a speech is using words that other people have used and very little of it is original. Of course we must use words that are known to others, and syntax that is commonly understood, so that they can understand what we are saying. That does not make our speech necessarily unoriginal.

If Hollywood were producing movies we enjoyed more no one would care if they were in series or not.