What a difference a decade makes. Or for that matter, try short of two.
The Evening Class project began in 2006 as an enthusiastic exploration of the self-publishing possibilities of the blogging medium, which was then in its ramp-up stages. The promising ideal of a “citizen press corp” (a term, I believe, coined by Susie Gerhard when she was serving as editor for SF360, the journalistic arm of the San Francisco Film Society) idealistically offset what was being recognized as the gradual weakening of what the fourth estate could offer to cinephilia. As ad revenues dried up for newspapers, so did columnar space for film reviews and commentary and—as the cogs often work in these geared transitions—blogs proposed an alternate form of publicity. It was a particularly exciting time for being the onset of the “blogosphere” when bloggers throughout the country and into other countries introduced themselves, shook each others’ hands, began meeting up at film festivals, and began linking into each others’ work to demonstrate and enjoy the variety of approaches to film coverage that editorial policies at newspapers could rarely afford.
Some of the blogs were erudite and incisive, such as Girish Shambu’s eponymous site, nuancing films with academic tools to better understand their structure and cultural import; others were like fanzines focusing on favored genres—horror, westerns, police procedurals, sword and sandal sagas; some were alert to all film-related events in their regional calendar, such as Brian Darr’s ever-informative Hell On Frisco Bay; some served an aggregate function like David Hudson’s itinerant Daily, strengthening the network of the blogosphere by profiling individual efforts swept up in the collective stream. There’s no doubt in my mind that without the interactions formed in the blogosphere—without Girish’s skill in gathering writers together to discuss film cogently, or Brian’s notifications of rare but important screenings, or David’s promotion of the best of our work—The Evening Class would never have found what it needed to grow and thrive: camaraderie.
It was a proud frenetic season of work and contribution. Being one of the very first bloggers in the Bay Area to request and be granted press credentials remains in my mind to this day a singular achievement. I helped lead a charge against the gatekeepers of film publicity, established working relationships with publicists based on new strategies of coverage, and watched over the years how the passion and practice of so many individuals fed into the strengthening of local film cultures and the capacity of film commentary to educate, enthuse, inform. I never identified as a film critic, always as an enthusiast, and tried to remain true to that spirit within.
Though I may have been one of the first to seize opportunity, however, it wasn’t long before storming the gates seemed like a high-flown scene in a Cecil B. Demille Biblical epic, a race to get the word out on a film before twenty-five others did, before fifty others did. As press passes began flying out like cards in a hand of poker; as publicists began hunkering down on what they required, if not demanded; as eventually each film festival developed their own social media departments with full-time committed employees, the obsolescence of the blogging format revealed itself. No longer needed to pick up the slack of the fourth estate, what was the role then to be played? How many blogs could a person keep up with? How many broken links before a broken spirit?
The decimating effect of the COVID pandemic on brick-and-mortar film festivals bifurcated access, producing virtual festivals and hybrid festivals (combining virtual screenings with in-theater screenings) that attempted to simulate the festival-goers’ experience. These were effective in varying degree; but—without question—the old days of audiences communally watching movies together in the dark shifted into the realm of the nostalgic. After two years of canceled film festivals, several have initiated re-entry into live screenings and it is yet to be determined how much of an impact the safety-in-place directives have influenced viewing habits. Who will return to watch movies in brick-and-mortar moviehouses? Who will fear to do so?
Not quite knowing where The Evening Class was to go next, I’ve elected to branch out from exclusive film coverage to incorporate literary and musical domains, using the same strategy of producing direct source material by way of interviews and Q&A transcriptions. During the COVID Interruption, I discovered the Academia website, joined, and was delighted to discover that conversations from The Evening Class were being incorporated into academic papers all over the world. This has given me the incentive to imagine this blog into the future. What follows will be the results of that incentive. I apologize to my readership for the long lapses in coverage, but hope you will join me in months to come.
