Quote Originally Posted by Ruslan View Post
Times change, and interpretation of art changes. Let me give you an example, and I will deliberately make it ... probably more provocative then it should be.

Let's say you have a film like Triumph of the Will. You know, a Nazi propaganda movie. In 1930's Germany, when such movie is shown in a theater, it is preceded by a revering explanation from the management, about how we're going to watch a movie about superiority of the Aryan race, etc.

In modern days, when a professor plays this movie to his students, he will most likely explain that the film is an artistic achievement, but it also shows how deluded and degenerate the Nazis were. There is no mention of the "superiority of the Aryan race". It's now no longer a movie about how 1930's Germany is superior, it's a movie about how 1930's Germany is deluded.

So, a change in this pre-film narration completely changes the context of the film. It is now not at all what the author intended. Was the modern-day professor wrong in appending his own narration to the film? Was he wrong in subverting the original author intent?
That's not what's happening here though. The equivalent to that film example would be, like, some tour guide showing off the statue and saying, "This statue is about female empowerment," or something. It might get some guff for being an incredibly stupid interpretation of what is clearly not a statue about female empowerment (this is assumed to be before Fearless Girl), but I doubt anyone would consider it immoral, unethical, or illegal.

A superior analogy to what's happening here would be if I magically transformed every copy of Triumph of the Will in existence into a version where I give that lecture at the front. Without the permission of the, in this hypothetical very much alive, creator of the film, or that of the film's distribution company. Every Youtube clip, every original copy, now has my lecture, and, because we're making it as analogous to the bull situation as possible, the lecture needs to fundamentally change the meaning of the film, even to modern audiences, somehow.

I would consider that bad. It's bad for the public because they don't get to have the original meaning of the film, and it's bad for the creators, which matters given that the real scenario features a non-Nazi artist. As was noted way back, we care a ton about George Lucas altering Star Wars, and that's the original artist doing it in a way that creates far less of a fundamental change. Keep in mind here, female empowerment has nothing to do with either the original intended meaning of the statue, the forceful something or another of America, or the meaning often assumed for it, love for bull markets. It's straight up a completely different thing.

So, we gotta assume that our Triumph of the Will lecture is something like, say, "This movie is about different varieties of marching and the metaphorical value thereof." Actually, what would be really funny would be to show off clips of other cool marches nation by nation, and stick Triumph of the Will in the middle of that. That could maybe be sufficiently meaning warping context to get close to this situation. And, again, it is now physically impossible to watch a version of Triumph that isn't the, "Ain't marching cool?" version. Seems much much less ambiguously problematic than the situation you presented, and also much much closer to the true situation we're dealing with.