From: James Kreul (email suppressed)
Date: Mon Mar 22 2004 - 13:44:59 PST
>I'm aware of the situation in Chicago and only wish
>that local writers in Portland took the work as
>seriously....or serious enough to write long reviews.
>When running an exhibition series we can usually
>expect a long-ish review once a year or once every 6-8
>months.
In a sense this kind of pattern goes back to Cinema 16 coverage in the
1950s and 1960s. Amos Vogel has commented on the lack of New York Times
coverage of Cinema 16 programming. But if you look at it, the coverage
that did exist had more to do with long lists of the season's films rather
than in depth coverage of individual shows. The reason for this is
obvious: it is easier to simply list a series of upcoming films than it is
to write something about them. The most common article about
UW-Cinematheque programming in the daily papers here is the: "well they're
at it again, showing a lot of interesting movies on campus you won't see at
the multiplex, here's a list of what they're showing..."
The other thing that has become clear to me is that editors are very
conscious of how much space they give to one arts organization in relation
to other arts organizations who are competing for similar space over the
course of the year. When I was more active in programming, I would have to
figure out when to play my cards: which film(s) were most likely to get a
full review, which would then draw attention to the series as a whole,
knowing that I won't get another full review for a while. If I had two
bigger events going on around the same time, I would either pick one to
focus on or try to figure out an angle to have both covered. To spend the
same amount of energy on every program would be a waste of time, because
they are not going to give you several weeks in a row of full in-depth
coverage.
One more thought, which I think I have mentioned a long time ago in a
similar thread: A very interesting experience I had was presenting a stack
of publicity stills from several different films to a photo editor and
watch him sift through them. I think if any filmmaker had a chance to see
this in action, they would approach their publicity stills differently. In
brief: if it doesn't have clear views of eyes, they're not nearly as
interested in it. The best stills are the ones in which some kind of
narrative situation is evident from facial expressions and clear views of
eyes (medium close ups, not extreme close ups or long shots). Obviously,
this is problematic for abstract work, and Fred mentioned a good alternate
solution of the multiple-frame strip, which is at least more graphically
engaging while still being comprehensible to most readers.
By the way, I hope it was clear in my earlier post that I didn't agree with
the "what do the readers want" idea, I was just trying to express how
editors seem to approach these questions. This is not only a problem in
arts coverage, it obviously affects how news in general is covered in local
papers (or any paper/network for that matter). But rather than arguing why
this mentality doesn't make sense (which isn't that hard) it's important to
understand you have to go up against those ideas when pursuing local press
coverage.
James Kreul
UW-Madison
email suppressed
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