Take One (Dec 2003 - Mar 2004)

> POl|lT CRITICAL MASS CAN WEST ANP TUS CORTTICS The denila ame within a day of the charges. In one of her columns last March, the Toronto Star’s media guru Antonia Zerbisias sounded an early alarm bell: CanWest Global Communications, owners of the biggest daily newspaper chain in the country, was planning on nixing a number of its regional arts critics and replacing them with centralized drones, she reported. The retort was as swift as it was dis missive: a CanWest press release denied any such plan. Approximately eight months later, Zerbisias couldn’t help but contain her giddiness, finishing her October 7, 2003 column by contending that indeed, two CanWest film critics had been elevated to “serve the entire chain” (a chain that includes Montreal’s The Gazette, the Ottawa Citizen, the Edmonton Journal, the Calgary Herald and The Vancouver Sun), with the exception of the National Post. Aspers would be overseeing such centralization, seeing as the family has always maintained its defiant Winnipeg-rather-than—Toronto-as—cultural-centre stance.) Take the CanWest coverage of the crucial Cannes Film Festival in May. This year, as part of what was clearly a cost-cutting plan, CanWest sent one critic to the south of France—fair enough, from a publisher’s perspective, given the cost of airfare and hotels. (In previous years almost every newspaper would send their own critic.) Writing throughout the chain in her May 26, 2003 wrap, Monk wrote: “At times, over the course of this marathon movie schmooze that was largely viewed as the worst Cannes festival ever, it really did feel like cinema was dead.” Sticking to Monk’s reportage meant that Brendan Kelly, an arts industry reporter and stringer for Variety who usually covers the event for The Gazette, didn’t attend. This was a clear example of a regional perspective getting lost in the franchise. Those two writers, as it turns out, are the Ottawa Citizen’s Jay Stone and The Vancouver Sun’s Katherine Monk. And, according to sources within CanWest, the decision to hire them as more or less national film correspondents came after film critics from across CanWest’s daily empire were asked to apply for the positions. Despite these new positions, however, regional critics (like John Griffin and Brendan Kelly at The Gazette) appeared to continue to be on their beats. It may just sound like so much more downsizing in a rapidly evaporating media world, but for a film culture and community as fragile and tenuous as Canada’s is, I would argue that filmmakers, as well as journalists, should be deeply concerned about such cuts. Most obviously, a sense of regionalism will be compromised, if not completely lost, in such a shuffle. (On a side note, it’s truly ironic that the By MATTHEW Hays DECEMBER 2003 — MARCH 2004 And that did mean the pages of the Montreal daily felt strangely different during this Cannes festival. It would be very hard to imagine, for example, that any Quebec critic would have spoken of thissyear’s festival in such disparaging terms, given that the twice-Oscar-nominated Denys Arcand had just served up a stunning, doubleaward-winning comeback, Les Invasions barbares, which played to standing ovations. Not to mention that Mambo Italiano, considered a pivotal project in terms of the viability of the economic future of Quebec’s movie business, screened at the Cannes market (but was not part of the Official Competition). This was a clear example of a regional perspective getting lost in the franchise. But beyond a loss of regional perspective, less Canadian critics working at our daily newspapers is a bad idea for the basic reason that Canada