Intertextual Property

My website is meant to be dedicated to discussing movies, so I’m obviously using others’ work as an explicit starting point for my own. Rather than just using the movies as ‘inspiration’ to blog about the ideas I got from them, I state the film title and explain a bit about it before getting into my discussion. Therefore, I am directly referencing the movies and implicitly crediting them as my inspiration and the basis of my work. I think that going forward, I should put more effort into acknowledging the specific people who made the film; this brings up the question, however, of who should be credited as ‘making’ the movie. The first figures that come to mind are director and screenwriter, and maybe some actors and writers of the source material (ex. Joyce Maynard who wrote the book that To Die For is adapted from). But should I recognize other contributors, especially if I may be referencing some aspect of the film that is there because of one of these others- the cinematographer, editor, etc? It’s hard to know how many people to explicitly credit in a relatively short blog post, and any decision about only keeps the questions open about whose work I should attribute my own to. By referencing the movie I am inherently crediting everyone who was a part of it, and viewers of my posts can look into who contributed to it themselves; but this implied extra work may be contributing to the lack of media literacy being fostered by short-form online content. At the same time, I am just one viewer sharing my own thoughts about a publicly available movie, and I’ve tried to position myself as such rather than an authoritative voice. My blog posts are my own work to the extent that these are my ideas that I have put into my own words, and I mean to encourage any readers to watch the movie I’m discussing if they haven’t already; my intentions treat each movie like a cited reference as much as a subject of discussion. Regardless of the debates about the existence of intellectual property, my transparency about the movies being my subject of discussion and idea-generating will hopefully recognize the work of their contributors, and the intellectual value of them.