"The Artist" may have won several Golden Globes, but there's at least one person who apparently hates the film because of some music it uses:

The director of The Artist has defended using music from Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo in his Oscar-tipped film after a complaint from its [Vertigo's] star Kim Novak. In a full-page ad in Monday's edition of trade paper Variety, the actress said "rape" had been committed with the use of Bernard Herrmann's score.

Here's what the 78-year-old lead actress of Hitchcock's 1958 classic sees as the problem:

By featuring the music [of Bernard Herrmann], she went on, the makers of The Artist, were guilty of "using emotions it engenders as if it were their own".

But that's what thousands of films do when they use pre-existing themes or entire songs as a sonic background to key moments in their stories. Indeed, some films use dozens of songs in this way, as the length of the scrolling credits at the end attests. Does that mean Novak believes all these to be "rapes", too, and the film-makers "guilty" of using the emotions as if they were their own? Surely it's more a matter of building on the achievements of others - and acknowledging that fact, as was done in "The Artist" (although Novak called it "cheating")? In other words, this is just how art works.

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