Arts Reviews E-Book

Celia Brayfield

• Herausgeber: Creative Essentials
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 208

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

The most wanted, the most feared, the most hated, the most powerful job in journalism: being a reviewer means writing about something you love and getting paid for it. So for a lot of people it's the No 1 dream job in the media. Whether your passion is film, music, books, visual arts or the stage, you can get closer to it as a reviewer and establish a career in one of the most influential roles open to a writer. Get the edge on the competition with a book that's a treasure trove of wisdom, experience and downright cunning, passed on by the best critics writing today. A great review will be read by millions, and writing it calls for a high degree of skill. Based on a lifelong passion, packed into a few hundred words and often written in less than an hour, a review makes heavy demands on writer's technique and experience. This book explains how to seize your readers' attention and how to be witty always, fascinating most of the time and bitchy when you need to be. Reviews from classic writers like Pauline Kael or Kenneth Tynan are contrasted with today's hot names including Mark Kermode and Stewart Maconie. We look back at the history of the critic and some of the groundbreaking groups who have shaped our culture, including Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table, the French New Wave directors who founded Les Cahiers du Cinema and London's celebrated Modern Review, founded by Julie Burchill, Toby Young and Cosmo Landesman.

Leseprobe

Celia Brayfield

ARTS REVIEWS

...and how to write them

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

INTRODUCTION

1. WHAT MAKES A GREAT REVIEW?

Arresting

Interesting

Authoritative

Professional

Personal

Appropriate

2. FIRST THOUGHTS

Preparation

Making notes

3. STARTING TO WRITE

Making notes

Read, watch or listen to the whole work

Trust your gut

4. THE WRITING PROCESS

Organising your ideas

Introduction – define your argument

Argument – developing your theme

Conclusion – look forwards

Different media

5. FINDING THE BALANCE

Editorial imperatives

The artists

The gatekeepers

6. THE BAD STUFF

Defamation – libel and slander

How to be bad

7. OPINION FATIGUE

Test your readers

Change your style

Champion a cause

V is for vendetta

8. NOT A GOOD LOOK

Too much information

Going gonzo

Ad glib

Giving away the ending

Vulgar abuse

9. A CRITICAL TIMELINE

The first critic

The press evolves

The critical muse

A wonderful town

Making new waves

More power to the people

Losing it at the movies

Underground overground

Low culture for highbrows

10. STARTING OUT

School

University

Postgraduate

First career

How to approach an editor

Appendix 1

Appendix 2 – Notes

Copyright

PERMISSIONS

Extract from That’s Me in the Corner by Andrew Collins, published by Ebury, reprinted by permission of the Random House Group Ltd and the author.

Extract from review by Dirk Bogarde of Gretchen Gerzina book, June 18, 1989, reproduced by permission of the Telegraph Media Group Ltd.

Extract from review by Mark Kermode of Pirates of theCarribbean:Dead Man’s Chest in The Observer, July 9, 2006, copyright Guardian News & Media Ltd, reproduced by kind permission.

This book is dedicated to Sir Simon Jenkins, with grateful thanks for his inspiration, his example and for giving me my first job as a reviewer.

ARTS REVIEWS

…and how to write them

INTRODUCTION

Most reviewers wake up every morning and can’t believe their luck. They’re getting paid to do what many of them would actually bribe someone to let them do anyway. They are going to be rewarded for indulging an obsession. Ahead of them is a day which they can devote to the activity that, with the possible exceptions of sex and food, they love best in the entire world. This they will be able to describe as their work. Truly, whoever called being a reviewer ‘the world’s best job’ was not wrong. The role offers you an irresistible balance of passion, pleasure and lack of responsibility. And you may well get paid for it. Life doesn’t get much better.

In this book I will be talking about reviewers rather than critics, although the terms mean almost the same thing. Of course the choice of word is deliberate – I’m a writer, I choose words as other people choose washing powder or life partners, for their essential qualities. Critic may be the traditional name for the person who is a professional audience for an art, but it sounds a little negative and the baggage that comes with it is heavy and ugly. I am also an artist; people talk about constructive criticism but, to the artist, the stuff in the media is rarely that. Artists do not often experience media criticism as a positive contribution to their work.

Critic is a also narrow word; it doesn’t suggest the central role that reviewers can play in championing, advancing, popularising or refining the art that they love. Their influence can be profound. Quentin Tarantino acknowledged his debt to the film critic of The New Yorker, Pauline Kael, whose notices he read faithfully while growing up, saying that she was, ‘as influential as any director was in helping me develop my aesthetic’.1

Here is Sir Tom Stoppard explaining that when he began to write plays they were directly influenced by the Observer’s drama critic, Kenneth Tynan: ‘Tynan mattered for his youth, his virtuosity in print, his self-assurance, his passion and above all for his self-identification with the world he wrote about. So… when I sat down to try to write a play, I was consciously trying to write for him.’2

Perhaps the most thrilling moments in a reviewer’s life are the times when it falls to you to be a witness to history. A young soprano appeared in an obscure opera at the Olympia Theater in Athens and one of the critics who heard her, Vangelis Mangliveras, wrote, ‘That new star in the Greek firmament, with a matchless depth of feeling, gave a theatrical interpretation well up to the standard of a tragic actress. With her exceptional voice with its astonishing natural fluency … she is one of those God-given talents that one can only marvel at.’ His judgement was so apt that Maria Callas was known afterwards as ‘The God-Given’ even by the rivals who hated her.

A great critic, says the music reviewer Norman Lebrecht, is ‘the conscience of his art’. Individual critics have left their distinct imprints on our creative life; their confident judgement and their intelligent support can define a great artistic movement and create the consensus that will recognise it. Groups of critics, brought together by the beliefs and values that they share, have deliberately steered their culture in a new direction. Even before that, great critics contributed immeasurably to the cultural life of their times, informing, challenging and stimulating their readers to a better understanding of the arts.

Many artists begin their careers as reviewers. Early in their creative lives, when they have yet to mature as practitioners, they have a passion for their field and often also a clear idea of where it should be going. The most striking example of a creative movement which began as an exercise in criticism is the cinema of France’s New Wave; a handful of iconoclastic youths attacked the timid, traditionalist French films of the 1950s in a new film magazine, Les Cahiers duCinéma, and almost instantly became the legendary directors creating a new cinematic style. As a reviewer, a developing artist becomes part of a creative profession, gains an understanding of its dynamics, meets the key players, falls in with like-minded friends and has the opportunity to issue a manifesto in every notice.

Equally, many reviewers don’t cross over to the creative side, either by choice or because they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time. As a young film critic, I would have liked nothing better than to become part of the British film industry, but at the time there wasn’t one. True, a few movies got made; it was a phenomenon like the desert rivers of the Middle East. After a long, cruel, dry spell there would be a flash flood; people would hail a new British cinematic movement and then, as with a wadi in the desert, the essentials – faith or money or tax breaks – would dry up, leaving only the name, the erosion and maybe a bleached skeleton to show where there had once been abundance.

You didn’t have to be a man to work on this now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t enterprise but almost all the writers, directors and technicians were male. Since the work was scarce, they were fiercely protectionist. The real action in movies was not in London, but in Hollywood, Paris, Warsaw or Rome, and I had a depressing sense of being a long way away from it. So when a desperate magazine editor offered me half a page of film reviews every month if I’d deliver a spread on television as well, it was a blessing in disguise. The British film industry probably lost the dreamiest production assistant it never had.

Having struck, as I saw it, a downright Faustian bargain and become a television reviewer, I found myself part of a golden age. Better still, few writers of any calibre in the press knew anything or cared less about this Cinderella backwater of the entertainment industry – that was the reason that my editor resorted to Mephistophelian manoeuvres. Overnight I became a media authority and in a few months I was headhunted by Fleet Street and spent the next seven years with the brightest, most creative and most exciting screen talents of the time.

It was strange to operate in the no-man’s-land between television and newspapers, territory that was heavily mined, full of barbed wire and shell holes, haunted by the ghosts of decent writers who had died under fire. TV was then and currently remains the dominant information medium, with 95% of the population relying on it for news coverage, a fact to which newspapers at that time were responding with dour resentment. Every year the television industry creamed off the top graduates from Oxford and Cambridge, yet the editors for whom I worked dismissed their work as lowbrow mass entertainment, unworthy of their attention and of no interest to our readers. When I thought about this attitude in relation to the significance of the industry, I felt as if my head would burst with the absurdity of it. So I went to war. Stories were my ammunition. I bombarded my editors with reportage, features, profiles and essays. Most were shot down, but gradually the section editors realised that I could deliver something halfway interesting and competently written that would plug the holes in their schedules.

I was working on an evening newspaper that had a classic problem with reader loyalty. Typically, people bought the paper only once or twice a week, on their way home from work, instead of getting it every day as the readers of morning papers tend to do. I knew, as an avid reader of the critics since my teens, that a good review needs to stand alone, meaning that it should be understandable to a reader who hadn’t followed any continuing debate around its subject. So I made sure that my work always passed that test, even when I was writing the TV listings.

I also loved reviewers who brought deep erudition to popular art, like Clive James, whose TV reviews glittered with running gags based on the absurdity of Dallas, and Alexander Walker, whose film criticism took his readers inside the live debates in the industry. Banned from studying the arts by my father, I had educated myself covertly from such erudite critics, disappearing into the recesses of the school library with its hallowed copy of The Times or rowing upriver on summer holiday mornings to buy the Sunday newspapers. I learned of Fellini from Dilys Powell, Diaghilev from Richard Buckle and Wagner from Bernard Levin. Naturally I set out to emulate my heroes, so I pitched my work far higher than the traditional TV writer, assuming that my readers were hungry for fun and for facts, and ready for a wider perspective on a medium that they took seriously even if my editors did not.

Soon I was getting fan letters and, even more impressively, the paper was getting sales. One of the most rewarding sights of my life appeared as I sat anonymously on a commuter train watching a passenger who carefully tore my column out of the paper, placed it reverently in his wallet and threw the rest of the newspaper away when he left the carriage.

After years of writing the editor passionate memos about What The Paper Needs I was allowed to launch the first media supplement in a British newspaper. It was immensely satisfying to be the first to spot a hit new series, to understand a new cult, to promote a gifted documentary-maker, to spotlight a stunning young actor or to champion a brilliant comedy performer who just hadn’t had the right break yet. The people I wrote about now run the British TV industry or else they’ve justly become international stars: Michael Grade, Greg Dyke, Melvyn Bragg, Jane Root, Michael Apted, Stephen Frears, Julie Walters, David Jason, Jeremy Irons.

When I got the confidence to write my first book, I found that I could draw on a reservoir of goodwill in high places. Many doors opened even before I knocked on them. My first publisher was one of my readers and actually asked my agent if I’d like to write a book for her. When I needed to approach major celebrities for interviews, their gatekeepers often reported back, in wondering tones, ‘He said, “Oh, I know Celia, I like her stuff, yes, tell her I’ll do it’’.’ By that stage, I also knew many of the gatekeepers and had managed to win their respect too.

Crossing over into TV would have been nice but almost impossible. You didn’t have to be a man to work in the industry at that time but the overwhelming majority of the people who did were male. Or else they were at least pretty; some, indeed, were the great beauties of our day, while I had an excellent face for radio. So when the day came that I woke up and realised that I wanted more, I went back to what I knew I was good at and became a novelist and had the interesting experience of being reviewed in my turn.

I soon discovered that book reviews turned out to be a great denominator of genius; when they were reviewing, first-rate writers had always read my books attentively and understood them, even if they found it alarming that they were international bestsellers. Second-rate writers read the blurb, the first page and, sometimes, the end, but felt free to advance devastating critiques on this flimsy basis.

Reviewing doesn’t have to be a vocation. It can be the first writing job you land just because you’re so determined to become a journalist that you’ll write anything anytime anywhere for anyone, just to get started. This is an excellent attitude and will often lead to professional success. If you don’t want to become a journalist that badly, perhaps you should reconsider your career choice because you’ll be competing with a large number of people who are passionate at that level.

So your first review may come your way because you’re the only person in the office willing to junk your plans for the evening and trek off to some poxy fringe venue in a gang-crime hotspot to review an act you’ve never heard of and miss the last train home, all in the cause of Art, filling up a quarter of a column in your publication, and – aha! – getting a by-line. Even before that, the ability to write a review that provokes people to read and respond can be your best chance of getting published on a fan site that’s doomed to disappear three months later but will leave you a by-line when it goes.

What’s a by-line? It’s the line that starts with ‘by’ and ends with your name. It’s your credit for writing a piece of journalism, the proof that someone with editorial authority has deemed you sufficiently interesting and responsible to be able to advance your own opinions under your own name. ‘By’ plus ‘your name here’. In the media, a by-line is what you need to get started. Once one editor has given you a by-line, you’re in the game and others will follow.

One day, you may become the editor, giving out by-lines in your turn. One day, your name may appear in cultural essays, authoritative biographies or the credits of top-rated arts shows. One day, you may be staying up late to read the first editions of the newspapers as they come up on the Web carrying reviews of your own film, or your novel, your art installation or your groundbreaking new production of DieWalkure. Whichever route you choose, it starts here, with the secrets of writing a great arts review.

1. WHAT MAKES A GREAT REVIEW?

A review can be a 2,000-word, state-of-the-art epic illustrated with a glossy photo-spread and splashed over four pages in an upmarket magazine with an international readership. A review can be a 150-word near-haiku included in a round-up of summer beach-reads in a local newspaper. It is probably easier to attain a towering reputation as a reviewer if your work fits the first of these formats, but you will probably start with the second. Of course it’s a challenge to shine in a space the size of an iPod Nano but writers do that. A great review doesn’t need space; usually, however, it does need to touch base with the following six qualities.

ARRESTING

Like all great journalism, great reviews grab the readers in the first half-sentence. Lord Beaverbrook, the legendary Canadian press baron of the mid-twentieth century, used to tell his reporters to ‘Put your best strawberries on top,’ meaning that they should lead every piece with the most attractive fact in the story. We will discuss the techniques of compelling writing later in this book. For now, let us just state that the No 1 attribute of a great review is its outstanding, upfront readability. It will stop you dead, grab your attention, tempt you, tease you, impress you and insist that your life will be poorer if you don’t read the story to the very last word. As does this introduction to a television review by Nancy Banks-Smith of the Guardian:

It was like stepping on a cat. The reaction was instantaneous. The moment James Hewitt arrived at his shirt makers (‘by royal appointment’) and had his credit card queried, I knew who he reminded me of. Of course, this was Burlington Bertie, the charming but impoverished toff, who once had a banana with Lady Diana.

After a long, liquid, alfresco lunch, he affably explained the purpose of the programme to passers by. ‘They’re doing it about me because I’m a complete shit, and we’re trying to make me less of a shit. And it’s not working!’ A fair enough summary of JamesHewitt: Confessions of aCad (Channel 4). He was fortunate in his producer, Mike Warner, who saw the funny side of Hewitt and, sometimes, the depression.3

INTERESTING

Well, yes. Obviously. A reviewer who has got the readers’ attention must then work twice as hard to keep it to the end of the piece. ‘You should entertain, amuse and touch people,’ says Anthony Quinn of the Independent, considered to be the film critic’s critic but also a respected literary reviewer who was one of the judges for the 2007 Man Booker prize.

Every publication tries to estimate the proportion of readers who are lost in the course of reading a piece. Web editors talk about the ‘stickiness’ of a feature, meaning the number of pages which a visitor will click through to after the first hit. Methods of measuring page traffic differ but the chilling result is always the same – the drop-out rate is huge. On my own newspaper the surveys showed that while 98% of readers would look at an article’s headline, maybe 60% would then begin the piece, but only 3% would finish it.

So – how to be interesting? Do you have a sinking suspicion that if you need to ask that you must be a natural-born bore? Excellent. Worrying that you’re being boring is where you start to get interesting. It’s a tough quality to define but you know it when you read it: the previous quotation, despite its elegance and wit, manages to feature sex, royalty, shopping, a dodgy credit card and bad behaviour in two little paragraphs. For the majority of the readers in our developed world that formula would work pretty well, but it would be hard to apply to a recording of the BrandenburgConcertos. Worse, a bad writer can tick all those boxes and still send the readers to sleep in two sentences.

Reviews can be immensely entertaining, especially the bad ones. There’s nothing quite as amusing as breathtaking bitchiness in print. You read one of the great pannings of all time, such as Mark Kermode’s condemnation of Pirates of the CaribbeanII, and because it flows as irresistibly as the Mississippi and sparkles like chilled Kristal you imagine that writing like that is easy. Then you set out to compose your own killer notice and find that you run out of words for ‘boring’ after the first paragraph.

That little word ‘interesting’ implies more than half the art of writing. To offer your readers prose that is glowing, supple and totally irresistible you need a rich vocabulary, a lyrical sense of language and the ability to build, refine and display an argument. You need to express strong feelings in a vivid vocabulary. You need to be able to educate your readers without them knowing it and win their sympathy while seeming not to care what they think. You need a well-developed sensitivity to their attitudes, for as many readers check out because they’re offended, as give up because they’re bored.

AUTHORITATIVE

A reviewer writes as an expert. Even when a reviewer pretends to be responding as a simple, ordinary member of the audience, she or he is in fact writing with the benefit of privileged information, accumulated experience, and often with academic knowledge as well. These three attributes give a reviewer the special insight which in turn establishes his or her authority with the reader. A reviewer, by definition, knows more and knows better. She or he has a sharper perception of form, a more rigorous understanding of content and a sophisticated perspective on the artistic context of the work. Therefore, a reviewer’s opinion has more merit than that of an ordinary person. As reviewing is increasingly democratised through interactive enterprises like blogs and review sites, so the premium on a critic’s authority has risen; it’s the one thing we can offer that the average representative of the cyber-rabble can’t match.

How does a reviewer project this authority? In some fields, notably the visual arts, reviewers have almost developed an elite dialect of critical terms in which to discuss the works in question. They use a privileged vocabulary, often to the extent that a casual reader cannot follow their argument without asking for explanation. They refer to critical theories and assume their audience has a large body of knowledge from which to understand the context of the work.

These strategies are not necessary to demonstrate the writer’s authority but in some fields they are customary. What is necessary is for the reviewer to make his or her expertise clear to the reader. Often this is done simply by offering readers the extra information that will allow them to appreciate the work more fully. It takes different forms in different media; a film review in a celebrity magazine will mention the latest gossip about the stars, a film review in a serious cinema periodical will refer to the director’s previous work.

PROFESSIONAL

A great review is also a great work of journalism and stands the tests of accuracy, balance and concision. Accuracy implies not only getting the facts right but also including the essential information about a work. Balance presents a reviewer with a series of challenges which we shall explore in more detail later. Reviewing is more of a balancing act than any other role in journalism. A reviewer is always a servant with at least two masters and often more. Between the art and the medium, between artists and editors, between the simple passion of an aficionado and the complex responsibilities of a reporter, a reviewer needs to make difficult decisions. Every individual draws their own line. Some adopt extreme measures to maintain intellectual detachment; others plunge over their heads into the world of their art.

Concision is a hard discipline but one that a writer must learn well in order to be a good reviewer. An experienced journalist’s first question is always, ‘How many words have I got?’ Beginning journalists often imagine that it is right to give an editor more words than they have requested. Big mistake. Editors like nothing better than copy written exactly to length. They do not like having to perform major surgery on a self-indulgent mess of writing when the edition deadline is 30 seconds away. If editors need a couple of extra paragraphs to have in hand in case their layout changes during the production process, they will ask for them by including them in the word count. Most copy is cut and the wise writer balances the piece carefully within the given length.

PERSONAL

Objectivity has only a small place in criticism. In fact, the essence of great criticism is the writer’s love affair with the art. As Norman Lebrecht says,

Great critics take their seats, whether in a Soho studio on a Monday morning or at the Metropolitan Opera on gala night – prepared to fall in love. They may despise the producers and question the credentials of every cast member but when the lights go down their breathing quickens like a child’s on its birthday. Their verdict may amount to defamation and damnation in a brutal phrase that will resound for a generation. But the loathing they vent is the effluence of love, of an all-consuming love … The echo of that love is the legacy of a great critic … an unconquerable optimism, a faith without doubt that art can redeem the miseries of mankind.4