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Comment by TigeriusKirk | Hacker News Reader

Steven Soderbergh made his own cut of Heaven's Gate and posted it on his blog. He says he was obsessed with the film and felt compelled to re-edit it. In my opinion, it's quite a good film in the re-cut form.

As his note says at the beginning, "I acknowledge that what I have done with this film is both immoral and illegal." But you know, he's Soderbergh.

https://extension765.com/blogs/soderblog/heavens-gate-the-bu...

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I'd love to see more examples of this, both with Heaven's Gate and other films. Some films have the right idea and filmed material, but were edited suboptimally. It's also informative to see how a director like Soderbergh approaches this; it seems commonly accepted in music, so why not film?

But is it immoral? From the artistic perspective obviously not. Artist (painters, sculptors, architects, composers) can sell and recreate their work ad infinity. Even scientist in many fields nowadays rehash the same idea in many papers. And for film, with the massive economics involved, this suddenly is immoral?

Certainly the appropriation of someone's creative output can be immoral.

>From the artistic perspective obviously not

I am not sure how you see that art production is exempt from the simple principle that authorship = ownership. Sure there are grey areas. One of the hardest jobs I have had as an art teacher in a university is defining (and explaining to students) a visual plagiarism policy.

Ah that's a good point. In my example I thought of the original authors expanding on a theme. Wouldn't that be the same for Soderbergh, except that by economics he is not the sole author = owner? So how should morality come into play when ownership is divested and possibly limiting of artistic freedoms of the principal artist(s). And who might the principal artists be in film. I'm mainly saying the morality argument is a lot more diverse in film and immoral is too strict in my perspective.

Correcting myself: Soderbergh was not involved in Heavens gate so the argument is less applicable. Still, say I paint a set of artistic variations on Mona Lisa (or a more current work) - am I stealing or interpreting. Isn't interpretation a strong theme in arts?

I think the limits for appropriation in art production are defined by intentions. We fairly assume that Soderburgs intentions were good. The contemporary British artist Glen Brown makes exact copies of paintings that he admires, yet they sell as original Glen Brown artworks.

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