Kevin B. Lee, who wrote for us about the best music videos of 2008 and whose video essays I’ve linked to of several times in the past, just informed me that his YouTube account has been “permanently disabled.” Kevin’s video essays wed critical commentary or conversation to clips from copyright films in a “teaching” context, and most of them were created as part of his project to “view every film on the list of 1000 greatest films of all time, as compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They?.” Kevin says he received a copyright warning earlier today in regards to his video essay on …And God Created Woman. It was the first time YouTube had ever slapped his wrist over one of the video essays, although they had contacted him about two unaltered clips in the past, one from The Sorrow and Pity and one from Dames. Three strikes, and Kevin’s out — YouTube has removed all 70 of his videos, including 40 original video essays. If you’ve embedded one of these in your own blog, that embed will now be unplayable.
In my first week as a SpoutBlogger, I linked to Kevin Lee’s video essay on Dario Argento’s Inferno. Twelve weeks later (putting us at last weekend), I met Kevin for the first time in Real Life, and he told me that the next installment of his project has going to investigate one of my favorite musicals, the Busby Berkeley-choreographed Dames. It’s now up at his site.
The actual video essay breaks down the film’s title number, one of the most batshit insanely kaloidoscopic musical sequences of Berkeley’s career, into symbols and meanings; the page it lives on is tricked out with quotes from the film’s original reviews, unadulterated clips of other musical numbers, and Lee’s own analysis.
My favorite part of the whole thing comes at about the 3:55 mark of the video, when Lee stops in the middle of his analysis to ponder the one scene that appears to have gotten away from Berkeley.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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