By JEAN-LUC GODARD [interviewed in Film Comment] – There is no intellectual property. I’m against inheritance, for instance. There’s no reason why the children of an artist shouldn’t benefit from the rights of their parent’s work, until they come of age . . . but afterwards, I don’t see why Ravel’s kids should own the rights to “Boléro”…

If I had to defend myself against the accusation of stealing images in my films, I would hire two lawyers with two different approaches. One would defend the right of quotation that only barely exists in cinema. In literature we can quote at length. In the Henry Miller book [Genius and Lust: A Journey Through the Major Writings of Henry Miller] by Norman Mailer, 80 percent of it is Henry Miller and 20 percent is Norman Mailer. Scientists don’t have to pay royalties to use a formula devised by a colleague. This is quotation, yet only cinema refuses to authorize it. I read Marie Darrieussecq’s Police files, and I think it’s very good because she takes a historical look at the question. Really, author’s rights are impossible.

An author has no rights. I have no rights. I only have duties. And in my film there are other types of borrowings, not quotations but simply extracts. It’s like an extraction when you do a blood test and take a sample to analyze. That would be the argument of my second lawyer. He would defend, for instance, the use of images of trapeze artists from The Beaches of Agnès. This shot is not a quotation, I’m not quoting Agnès Varda’s film: I benefit from her work. It’s an excerpt that I take and incorporate elsewhere, so that it takes on another meaning, in this case to symbolize peace between Israel and Palestine. I didn’t pay for this shot. But if Agnès were to ask me for some money, I feel I could pay her a fair price. That would be related to the economics of the film, the number of viewers it reaches…

Continued at Film Comment | More Chronicle & Notices.