Harmy said:
trimboNZ said (in the ESB:R thread):
Recently I sat down with my seven year old son and introduced him to Star Wars. ANH seemed the right place to start and as for which version, well there was no contest.
My next dilemma is whether to wait for this edit to be completed before showing him ESB.
Having just read this, I must apologise to thecolorsblend and acknowledge that there is something to what he says. In light of this post, fanedits don't seem altogether as harmless as I'd have liked to think. The post shows that some people may actually be exposed to a fanedit of a film before they saw the original and there's definitely something wrong and disturbing about that.
Although I must say that STAR WARS and specifically Revisited is a bit of a special case, since Ady's version is is actually closer to the original cut than the official Special Edition, so I definitely think it's preferable for first time viewers to be shown Revisited than the Special Edition.
No apologies necessary. Anywho, I "excuse" Ady on the grounds that ANH-R ought to shame The Technicians That Be at Lucasfilm, who have a lot more money and better equipment at their disposal, and yet their product is inferior to his. I don't know if that's what Ady set out to prove when he started working on the movie but that's one thing he's definitely accomplished.
CatBus said:
I hate to get all post-modernist on this thread, but the whole idea of authorship in art is much less relevant than people give it credit for. The meaning of a work to society is frequently not what the author or authors or executive producers or publishers intended it to be. And who's right when there's a disagreement between the creator and society? IMO the readers, viewers, fans, etc, are always right. It's society who gives a work its real meaning, which is how the meaning of a work can change over time, and successfully become timeless... or fail to do so.
So it doesn't MATTER who edited what when and for what reason, really. What matters is that a big chunk of society saw this hodgepodge collective work and fell in love, probably for hundreds of completely different reasons. And it became a cultural force of its own at that point.
And that's what's important, the cultural impact, and that's what we're trying to preserve. All the discussion about author's intent and definitive versions and crap is beside the point. Not that we can't have opinions on those, naturally.
Not the point. This isn't about an artist's intent vs. the public's interpretation. That's beyond anybody. This is about an artist's moral right to not have his/her work tampered with. The examples you cite of an author dying and somoene else finishing the work is an extreme case. There is no real option to release the work as is most of the time so someone else is brought in to finish it off. It's apples and oranges.