From: Fred Camper (email suppressed)
Date: Sat Mar 11 2006 - 17:24:06 PST
Thanks for the info, Kevin. I'd guess you're also describing the
situation generally, and I think I made a mistake in griping about
payments to writers, because I think what's happening with the one or
two of my articles I believe are in regular use is that the publications
they were written for (in the pre-1989 copyright era) are getting and
keeping any payments. It probably doesn't matter to them that I never
was paid.
It's interesting that the three replies so far focused on my writer's
gripe, which was really a side ramble to the larger points about the
value of one person shows over festival group shows and of individual
artists over institutions. This is a point also missed in the people who
replied ot me earlier. Few seem to value the integrity of an individual
artist's positions about her or his art, or the idea of of valuing
"powerful and individual life" (quoting Zola on the conclusions that he
and his boyhood friend Cezanne had reached in their youth). All this
does is confirm my sense that so many think more in terms of
institutions than individuals, except, of course, when mounting personal
attacks on individuals.
People also seem to have missed that my response to learning that my
writing was being used for classes is to make it more accessible, and
for free. The point is not the money that I'm missing, so K wasn't
writing the the personal whine some took it as, but rather the attitude
I -- mistakenly, in this case -- thought was exemplified in using
writing without payment. But we know from posts here that that attitude
has been applied to filmmaker's work.
For me one miracle and glory of great cinema is the difference between
the work of different artists, and the difference between the positions
different artists take about life and the world and their medium. It is
thus the individual artist who I think should be honored first.
Fred Camper
Chicago
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