|  SOC’s
Aufderheide Wins Career Achievement Award
SOC
Professor Patricia Aufderheide’s documentary film scholarship has
earned her one of the International Documentary Association’s (IDA)
top career achievement awards. But it’s earned scores of documentary
filmmakers much more.
“Pat has effected real change for documentarians,” says entertainment
lawyer Michael Donaldson, who formally presented Aufderheide with the
IDA’s 2006 Preservation and Scholarship Award in Los Angeles in
December. “I was talking to an Oscar-winning filmmaker—Arthur
Dong. He said to me, ‘It’s like a huge weight lifted off my
shoulders. I never thought I’d get to finish this film, and now
I can.’ He was talking about Pat’s work.”
Dong’s documentary, The Chinese in Hollywood Project, explores
Hollywood’s portrayal of Chinese Americans. Like many documentaries
critiquing or analyzing the media, it would be almost impossible to produce
without one of two things—a multimillion-dollar budget or the Documentary
Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use, which
Aufderheide helped produce last year.
According to copyright law, filmmakers can freely use copyrighted material
in their films “as the object of social, political, or cultural
critique,” to “illustrate an argument,” incidentally
“in the process of filming something else,” or within a “historical
sequence.” The problem is often those who control whether a documentary
ever reaches the screen don’t know that. As a result, fears of lawsuits
have driven producers to pay thousands just because one of their subjects
sang “Happy Birthday” on camera. Such fears could be even
more damaging to a film like Dong’s, which uses numerous clips from
copyrighted films to discuss how movies perpetuate stereotypes about Chinese
Americans.
“In my law practice every week there are dozens of clips where I
say to the filmmaker, ‘This is fair use,’” says Donaldson,
who serves as general counsel to the IDA. “But the gatekeepers,
the people who are in charge of being sure they don’t get sued,
the insurance companies . . . [They] are unwilling to take that risk.”
Not taking that risk doesn’t just cost filmmakers money, Aufderheide
found in a 2004 study she completed with Washington College of Law Professor
Peter Jaszi; it costs filmmakers films.
“We were less concerned with the dollar cost, but more concerned
with the cost to the imagination,” Aufderheide explains. “The
worst thing we found was that filmmakers just decided not to do certain
projects.” Specifically, her Rockefeller Foundation–funded
report found documentaries offering media criticism were increasingly
in short supply due to the lack of understanding surrounding fair use.
Her work didn’t stop with that study, however. Teaming with Jaszi,
the IDA, and dozens of filmmakers, Aufderheide boiled down the legalese
of fair use copyright law into an eight-page pamphlet documentarians greeted
with near biblical fervor. “I feel like I died and went to independent
filmmaker heaven,” said Beyond Beats and Rhymes director
Byron Hurt during a ceremony celebrating the publication’s release
last spring. “This is a great day for filmmakers, but more importantly,
it is also a great day for the public,” declared Alternate Media
Center cofounder George Stoney during the same ceremony.
Beyond the Best Practices in Fair Use statement, which has now
been given to thousands of filmmakers, distributors, and organizations,
the IDA award recognizes Aufderheide’s extensive writing and teaching
about documentary film. The director of AU’s Center for Social Media
has penned numerous articles and books on documentaries, served as a juror
at the Sundance Film Festival, and opened hundreds of students eyes to
the complexities of the genre’s history, ethics, and techniques.
“Pat Aufderheide’s work as a journalist, policy analyst, author,
and professor has demonstrated her deep commitment to social justice through
creative use of media,” says Sandra Ruch, executive director of
IDA, which represents nearly 3,000 film professionals in 50 different
countries. “Our members, as well as the public at large, benefit
from her work in many direct and indirect ways.”
“Documentary filmmaking is a vibrant part of the media that fuel
public knowledge and action, and it is a great honor to have my scholarship
about it be recognized,” Aufderheide says. “I also hope that
the award can draw attention to the parts of my work that can be most
immediately helpful to filmmakers.”
-Matt Getty, originally published in American Weekly
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