Giving Sita a Voice

Nina Paley talks about her revolutionary film Sita Sings the Blues

Jazz singer of the 1920s Annette Hanshaw and her works have been given a new lease of life by a most unexpected person – Sita from the Ramayana fame.

In a creative production that is genius and very telling of our times (in that it involves the East and the West almost seamlessly) Annette Hanshaw is the voice of Sita in Sita Sings the Blues a film by Nina Paley. In a wonderful re-telling of the Ramayana, Sita is the protagonist and her story is told from a perspective that is at once unique and universal.

Set in a cartoon format, the full length feature film has also become famous for the stand that film-maker Nina Paley has taken against copyright issues. The film is free to watch. A search on Google will provide you with a very high resolution format. So basically, this film is free to watch, free to distribute and free to air, yes, even commercially. You may or may not share the proceeds with Nina Paley.

Nina Paley, America’s Best-Loved Unknown Cartoonist, as www.blog.ninapaley.com calls her, found time in her very busy schedule to share her thoughts about various aspects of the movie with Tanu.

The new distribution model is revolutionary. But how will you make money?

The same way most artists have always made money: by depending on the generosity of friends and strangers, and (where appropriate) by providing my official endorsement to particular distributions, namely those that share some of their profits with me.

But there's an assumption in your question: that before now, copyright funded most art. It didn't, actually. Copyright was designed in the first place to subsidize distribution, and that's primarily what it has always done. So this model isn't really as revolutionary as it might seem. What's revolutionary is that it's gotten so much easier to do what artists have been doing all along -- get support from their fans.


You’ve said that you just had to do this film in this particular way although you were aware of the rights issues. Tell us a bit about that creative process which you embarked on anyway.

As trite as it sounds, the film wanted to be made. I was the only one who could see it (in my head), so it was my job to make it real. While working on the film I thought this a lot:

Inspiration

Our Idea
Which art in the Ether
That cannot be named;

Thy Vision come
Thy Will be done
On Earth, as it is in Abstraction.

Give us this day our daily Spark
And forgive us our criticisms
As we forgive those who critique against us;

And lead us not into stagnation
But deliver us from Ego;

For Thine is the Vision
And the Power
And the Glory forever.

Amen.

What market do you have in mind for this film?

The nice thing about releasing a film to the entire world is that I don't have to think about markets. The markets will self-organize; the film will find them, and they will find the film. All I have to do is release it. The Internet does the rest.

Many will be seeing Sita in a new light. How do you feel about that?

Sita is already seen in a billion lights, because every interpretation of the Ramayana is slightly different. There have been feminist retellings in India for ages, but they've remained localized. An example is Nabaneeta Dev Sen’s article about certain women's retellings in India. The main thing that's new in Sita Sings the Blues, other than my own individual perspective which is neither more nor less important than any other individual's, is the medium. Film is a mass medium, and since I've made it available digitally, it's able to spread much farther than older versions.

You’ve mentioned being harassed by Hindu fundamentalists. What kind of interference did you get from them?

No interference, just some online harassment.

The film hasn't screened in any major Indian film festivals, even though several expressly wanted it at first. I assume this is because the fear of controversy made certain individuals on the programming committees pull back. The great thing about the free release is, no one can censor the film now. People are free to share it with each other, and neither protestors nor bureaucrats can stop it.

Fundamentalists and other tyrants wouldn't have any power if people didn't give it to them through fear. They want people to be afraid, it helps them control. Don't assist them.

Tell us about your time in Trivandrum which partly inspired this story of Sita?

I've travelled a lot, and Trivandrum was more different from the US than anything I'd ever experienced. I had some Malayali friends in San Francisco, and had read a lot about Kerala due to its high literacy and relatively low fertility rates, but actually living there I experienced huge culture shock. On the one hand, I made friends there with some of the coolest, brightest, feistiest women I'd ever met. On the other hand, I could never meet up with them after work, because single women simply didn't go out at night. This was in 2002, and things were already changing fast there, so that may not be the case anymore. We had friends from Mumbai who were living in Trivandrum who also said Mumbai was quite different. Even Kochi was said to be much more liberal. I also remember the men mostly wore Western clothes - button-down shirts and trousers - and the women almost exclusively wore "traditional" clothes, saris and salwar suits. It was quite striking in the workplace, like men and women were from different eras.

The food was fabulous. I developed a dosa addiction there that plagues me to this day. In fact today I'm walking across town to get a dosa at Saravanaas here in New York. Dosas are expensive here, but what else can I do?

The land around Trivandrum was stunningly beautiful, but it was hard for me to enjoy since my marriage was collapsing.

Where would you say copyright laws (which in many instances protect the rights of the artists) have gone wrong?

Well, do those laws really protect the "rights" of the artists? The effect the laws had on me was precisely the opposite: they nearly prevented me from making my art.

Most artists care a lot about attribution, and sometimes copyright is held up as a way to protect that right. But copyright is just about restricting copying, not about guaranteeing accurate attribution. If we want separate laws to protect attribution, we can easily have that without restricting sharing. (And copyright laws actually make attribution less likely: someone who, say, copies a passage is often afraid they'll be accused of copyright infringement, so they often strip
out the crediting they otherwise would have happily included.) So attribution isn't protected by copyright, and is often harmed by it.

But some people feel that artists should have this other monopoly right, unrelated to attribution: the right to control who can make copies of what, and who can make derivative works of what.

That's not any kind of natural right. There's nothing good about that right: it just breeds restriction and censorship. If I make a copy of a song, the original author doesn't lose the song, nor does she lose credit for the song, right? So why can't I do it? Why can't someone make a copy of my movie?

To answer your question: copyright law goes wrong when it starts restricting copying. So it's pretty much wrong all the time, since that's all it does.

You’ve mentioned that your next project would be about copyright laws. What do you have in mind at this stage?

I'd like to do a series of short cartoons about Free Speech. I'm working on it with Karl Fogel of QuestionCopyright.Org