Category: media

Aleksandr Sokurov’s one-take movie “Russian Ark” at the Hermitage Museum is getting all sorts of attention for all sorts of the wrong reason, writes Nigel Andrews. “The whole world loves useless virtuosity. Masterpieces come 10 a penny, but building the Taj Mahal with matchsticks – that’s real achievement. Without its history-making the single-take ‘Russian Ark’ would be a routine Sokurov essay in narcoleptic expressionism. Now he has accepted a challenge to make the Great Russian Movie and the result is fascinating, maddening, boring and hypnotic, in any adjectival order you want.”

“The new, year-round home of the Toronto International Film Festival, scheduled to open by September 2006, will be a four to six-storey ‘podium’ at the base of a condominium tower that could be as high as 38 storeys. [But] details of the festival’s home and the tower it will anchor were sketchy at a well-attended media conference yesterday announcing the start of a $120-million capital/endowment campaign for the TIFF facility, currently being called Festival Centre.”

The ever-increasing blur between news and entertainment on television is either fascinating or horrifying, depending on how you look at it. With ‘reality’ shows competing with actual reality for viewer’s eyeballs, watching TV has become intensely disturbing and confusing. “On the one hand, CNN presents strategic maneuvers in Iraq as if it’s covering the Olympic Games; on the other hand, paratroopers – I mean contestants – take the leap for cash prizes on NBC’s ‘Fear Factor.’ It’s one big interwoven mesh of reality, unreality, and – when it comes to ‘Flipper’-like news segments on mine-sensing dolphins – surreality.”

Minnesota, like many states, has a film office whose job it is to lure movie companies to film in the state. The office helps arrange permits, scout locations and generally make filmmakers’ lives easier. It also offers rebates – called “snowbates” here – to bribe production companies. But the state’s governor has cut the ofice’s budget, and it looks like much of the Minnesota film business will go away. “The board keeps a tally of money spent on filmmaking in the state and compares it to the amount it gets in state subsidies. Over the past 10 years, the ratio is 33 to 1.”

National Public Radio has ambitious goals – 300 new member stations and 5 million new listeners by 2010. But where are they going to come from? “In today’s crowded radio market, increasing the number of NPR stations by half can seem far out of reach. Most large and medium markets lack room for new frequencies. Licensees such as state universities have no money to buy frequencies anyway.”

American radio giant Clear Channel Communicarions “finds itself fending off a new set of accusations: that the company is using its considerable market power to drum up support for the war in Iraq, while muzzling musicians who oppose it.” Is Clear Channel keeping musicians with political opinions of which the company disapproves off its stations?

What happened to the arts on TV? “Even in this niche-rich era of digital cable and the baby satellite dish, television doesn’t have a lot of room for plays, dance or serious music, let alone literature or the visual arts. PBS schedules less classical music, jazz, theater and dance than it did a quarter century ago. ‘CBS Sunday Morning’ is the only regularly scheduled program in the whole of network TV that gives the fine arts the time of day. A&E, which was ARTS and then the Arts & Entertainment Network, is keener on E than A these days.” So what’s the reason?

“For those of us trying to juggle these polar mood swings while watching the war on television, there are two conflicts raging — the fight between the antagonists themselves and the pitched battle between journalism and the imperatives of show business. The conflicts are intertwined, and the second determines how we view the first. If we are to penetrate the fog of the real war, journalism must be the clear victor over the inherent need of TV to impose its surefire entertainment formulas, its proven arsenal of slick storytelling and rousing characterization, on a reality that may not be nearly so neat. In this war, American TV news has an unusually tough job. It must not only compete with other TV storytellers with fierce agendas, starting with Iraqi TV, but it must maneuver around the manipulations of an administration so television savvy it doesn’t leave a single backdrop to chance.”

The BBC’s arts coverage is constantly under attack. But the fixer can’t be more down-market pop art, can it? Is the public broadcaster fixated on the large ratings for Rolf Harris’s art odyssey? “What next? Will the Rolf Experience be followed by Cliff Richard on Beethoven? Will audiences of five to seven million become the benchmark – a favourite word of TV planners – by which other arts programmes are judged? Having won such audiences, can they settle for less?”

When the CEO of the second largest chain of radio stations in America decided to ban the Dixie Chicks from his airwaves because of political remarks one of the group’s mambers made, the Chicks’ airplay vanished. “The downside of media consolidation is that we now allow a few people’s overreaction to become policy. It opens up a very dangerous can of worms. In this case, one of the CEOs decided he wanted to make a statement. . . . But consolidation means that group ownership can do anything it wants . . . .”