Skip to main content

Blog

CREATe / BFI Education Screening Event on Copyright & Creative Reuse

Posted on    by Admin
Blog

CREATe / BFI Education Screening Event on Copyright & Creative Reuse

By 11 October 2017No Comments

Event Title: CREATe / BFI Education Screening Event on Copyright & Creative Reuse
Venue: London, BFI Southbank, NFT3, Belvedere Rd, South Bank, London SE1 8XT
Date: 8 December 2017
Time: 1100-1830
Speakers: Bartolomeo Meletti, Claudy Op den Kamp, Annabelle Shaw, Frank Gray, Jenny Hammerton, Leontien Bout, Ronan Deazley, Mark Robinson, Charlie Lyne, Ben Green, Shane O’Sullivan, Lionel Bently
Social/ PR: @copyrightuser #createcin @copyrightcentre



The event explored the role of copyright in relation to creativity, film archives, and education, with focus on creative reuse. The common theme to tie these topics together is the creative reuse of the character of Sherlock Holmes. As outlined below, the evolving journey of the notorious detective from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories illustrated by Sidney Paget to its most recent adaptations – passing through William Gillette, Basil Rathbone and others – provides a compelling story to explore the role of copyright in relation to creativity, archives, and education.

William Gillette’s 1916 film adaptation of Sherlock Holmes is considered a key to understanding the cinematic representation of Sherlock Holmes. Long presumed lost since its first release, the film was discovered in October 2014 at the Cinémathèque Française film archive in Paris, and restored. In 1899, William Gillette – seeking Conan Doyle’s collaboration and endorsement of his play Sherlock Holmes, A Drama in Four Acts – famously asked the writer ‘May I marry Sherlock Holmes?’; and Conan Doyle replied: ‘You can marry him, or murder him or do what you like with him’. The character of Sherlock Holmes also features in Copyright User education resources focussing on creative reuse: The Game is On! and Copyright Bites. The event will bring together copyright law experts, film archivists and custodians, filmmakers and other creators. The event will provide the platform for a constructive dialogue between the people who preserve and provide access to existing films, and those who wish to reuse films in the creation of new work.

Schedule

10:30-11:00: Registration 

11:00-11:10: Welcome and CopyrightUser.org – Bartolomeo Meletti (CREATe, University of Glasgow / BFI)

11:15-13:00: Preservation, Digitisation & Access

Chair: Claudy Op den Kamp, Bournemouth University

  • Annabelle Shaw (Rights Database Manager, BFI) –“Elementary? It’s more of a three pipe problem” – Unlocking Film Heritage
  • Frank Gray (Director of Screen Archive South East) – Screen Archives and Copyright
  • Jenny Hammerton (AP) – Searching for Sherlock

Legal respondent: Leontien Bout (Lawyer and archivist, EYE)

13:00-13:45: Lunch

13:45-15:30: Creative Reuse

Chair: Ronan Deazley, Queen’s University Belfast

  • Mark Robinson (Shiver) – I Was There – The Secrets of Celebrating Archive
  • Charlie Lyne (Filmmaker and Film Critic) – Working with Fair Dealing
  • Ben Green (Ben Green Associates / Former BBC’s Head of Rights Business Development) – “Polar bears don’t have agents….”: Rights challenges around creative re-use of archive 
  • Shane O’Sullivan (Director and Producer / Senior Lecturer in Filmmaking at Kingston School of Art) – Creative reuse in documentary filmmaking and education

Legal respondent: Lionel Bently, University of Cambridge

15:30-15:50: Tea/coffee/drinks break

15:50-17:00: Screening of Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. (1924), accompanied by Neil Brand

 17:00-18:30: Drinks reception (Blue Room)