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piratecinemaberlin
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Keep Up Your Rights. First Preliminary Program of the Berlin Pirate Cinema
The only thing we’ve seen from this year’s Berlin Film Festival was a dark
limousine parked on Hackescher Markt with a printed logo that read "Cinema for
Peace". Which is a blatant lie: since the applied combination of computers and
the internet, cinema - apart from a few marginal cinemas - is cinema for war.
This "War on Piracy" is, first, a war against their own customers, and it is
openly advertised as such. Whoever enters a German cinema or video store will
see himself, shot from behind, either handcuffed, under the slogan "Copythieves
are Criminals", or harrassed by fellow inmates, with the punchline "Hard, but
fair". They even went on a promotional tour with a mobile prison cell, which is
a marketing idea that not even the weapons industry has ever come up with.
Next, the "War on Piracy" is a war against their own employees, these new
proletarians of "Intellectual Property", embodied by the sound engineer who
can’t afford his health insurance or the camera assistant who can’t pay back
her student loans. And that’s not because they have been cheated out of the
ownership of the means of production, not because the worldwide labor market
keeps their wages down and not because their debt is the very business of
insurance and credit companies, but only — German Ideologiekritik would refer
to the term of the Traumfabrik here: mass fabrication of dreams, lies and movie
reels — because of the applied combination of computers and the internet.
But above all, the "War on Piracy" is a war against revolution: against the
French Revolution that has generalized individual rights and against the
Digital Revolution that has generalized the individual exchange of data. What
cinema - with the only exception of the French Cinema and the Digital Cinema -
wants to generalize is the cancellation of these rights and the cancellation of
these exchanges. That’s why we’re all criminals: not only those who circumvent
the copy protection of a DVD or bring a camera to a cinema — in the U.S. today,
both will face prison terms that dwarf the ones for theft and even exceed the
ones for manslaughter — but everyone who insists on the basic banality that
whatever is digitized has already been, and can always be, copied, and that
whatever can be seen has already been, and can always be, reproduced.
But instead of dropping the images altogether, which would be simple, cinema
presents to us what it claims to be its rights: infinite copyrights that will
never expire and that it threatens not only to protect, but to digitally manage.
In order to make the expropriation of the people irreversible — the dream of
cinema — they need more than all the legal backup that money can buy: they need
a technical implementation. This is a war that Orwell had no imagination of and
that even Kafka could not entirely figure out — and to make the slightest
glimpse of this war disappear behind the smokescreen of public relations and
free limo services (it was a Phaeton, by the way: the only luxury limousine on
earth that is named after a son who crashed in his father’s car) is the very
program of the Berlin Film Festival. The cinema of the 21st century stands as
much "for peace" as the drug enforcement agencies or the anti-terror police, and
the Berlin Pirate Cinema is simply what we’re running to keep up our rights.
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