Pia audience survey chart/Oshima's Mao documentary

[Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto]

I look forward to reading Aaron?s response to Mark?s comments.

On a different note, does anybody know if Oshima Nagisa?s ?Mo Takuto to
bunka daikakumei? (Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution, 1969) is
available for renting/purchase (in any format)? A colleague of mine is
organizing a conference on the Cultural Revolution, and interested in
organizing a panel around this TV documentary. Any lead would be greatly
appreciated. 

Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto
NYU




On 06.1.13 10:38 PM, "mark schilling" <schill at gol.com> wrote:

> Thanks for the information that magazines are a commodity. Having written
> for them for twenty years, I'm vaguely aware of that. But service magazines
> like Pia are, believe it or not, trying to provide services -- and the
> audience survey is one of them.
> 
> I'm also quite well aware that, to conduct a thoroughly scientific poll,
> you'd have to send pollsters out around the country, make sure your sample
> reflected the overall audience for the entire run of film, etc., etc. Pia
> doesn't do that. No one does and no one ever will -- it's expensive, time
> consuming and, frankly, not worth the use of resources, especially for one
> Tokyo-based magazine.
> 
> What Pia does do is ask Tokyo moviegoers  the sort of simple up-down
> questions that real people ask their friends about a movie they've just
> seen. Did you like it? How much? Granted, a one-to-hundred scale is not
> "accurate," but it's bit more precise that the usual thumbs up, thumbs down
> or shrug. And when you have eighty or a hundred such numbers you have a
> slightly better read for what people actually think about a film than asking
> your three closest friends. Internet message boards and chat rooms are other
> sources of this sort of info, but the people who log in are also self
> selecting -- and if they are not always movie nerds they are also often not
> what anyone would consider average.
> 
> What the Pia numbers tell me is not whether film A truly and actually
> outranks film B in popularity. It gives me a rough, but generally accurate
> read (as measured by corresponding BO figures) for whether real people
> walking out of real theaters liked a movie or not. The number one rating for
> Summer Time Machine Blues does not prove that it was really the most popular
> mini-theater film released in Japan in 2005 -- I never said that. What is
> does indicate is that, for whatever reason, Motohiro is connecting with his
> audience -- that his popularity is not simply driven by Fuji TV hype. Of
> course, a producer thinking of putting money into his next film would want
> to see the box office numbers first and foremost, but the Pia number one
> rating is another plus for him, like winning an Audience Prize at a film
> festival. Those prizes are also not an entirely scientific measure of a
> film's popularity -- they are decided by those who take the trouble to tear
> the little cards at the end of a single screening -- but they are valued by
> the film's creators, distributors and, most importantly in the commercial
> sense, buyers.
> 
> Finally, are the "man in the street" comments worthless? I suppose so, if
> you believe that what ordinary fans think is of no importance. As a
> journalist writing for industry folks who make their living from those
> ordinary fans I think those comments can occasionally be of interest.
> 
> I'll let you have the last word, Aaron, as always. I've had my say on this
> subject. Happy New Year!
> 
> Mark Schilling
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Aaron Gerow" <aaron.gerow at yale.edu>
> To: <KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu>
> Sent: Saturday, January 14, 2006 2:07 AM
> Subject: Re: Pia audience survey chart
> 
> 
>> >
>>> > > Pia is not "selling information" so much as providing a service to
>>> > > readers,
>>> > > telling them how several dozen ordinary moviegoers felt about the film
>>> > > they
>>> > > have just seen.
>> >
>> > Certainly Pia does provide a service, but any researcher of the
>> > information society--and some studies have been done of Pia and the
>> > johoshi--will tell you that information is not just a service, but a
>> > commodity that is produced and marketed, and thus subject as much to
>> > the effects of commodity capitalism as any other product. As we all
>> > know, there are many products out there that are not sold for their
>> > utility, but for their image or other factors that are as produced as
>> > the commodity itself. Joho is no different.
>>> > >
>>> > > Scientific? Probably not -- but again, the results are intended for,
>>> > > not
>>> > > researchers, but readers looking to get a sense for whether a film is
>>> > > for
>>> > > them or not. As a journalist (formerly with Screen International, now
>>> > > with
>>> > > Variety), I sometimes find Pia rankings valuable for getting a "man (or
>>> > > woman) on the street" take on a film I can't get from a flack or a
>>> > > critic.
>>> > > The comments are especially revealing in their honesty, though raves
>>> > > are
>>> > > more common than pans.
>> >
>> > But my complaint is that it doesn't give you a man on the street view.
>> > It gives you a view of a small audience that happened to go to see the
>> > film in the first few days it was released at a particular set of
>> > theaters. (Pia does not keep polling weeks down the line and doesn't do
>> > much polling in the boonies.) First, the people who go to the see the
>> > film early are not always the "average" people (especially when it
>> > comes to idol movies or others with a strong fan base). Second, the
>> > questions are vague, because they don't give the respondent any
>> > comparative standard for rating (to one person, a 75 may be good, but
>> > for another a 75 is a bad rating). Third, different audiences have
>> > different standards: a person used to TV who goes to the movies only
>> > once a twice a year and is drawn to a film by big TV advertising will
>> > apply different standards of judgment compared to an avid film fan who
>> > sees art films once every other week. Since different audiences go to
>> > different films, the results cannot easily be compared (that's why the
>> > Pia best ten is largely useless, I believe), unless you are comparing
>> > the same kinds of films polled under similar conditions.
>> >
>> > I'm not saying that the comments or results in Pia should be ignored:
>> > they may provide a good quote or footnote. But they do not represent
>> > the man on the street and I find them much less useful than comment
>> > sites like yahoo.jp, where you can actually read the opinions and get a
>> > better sense of who is responding and what their arguments are. But
>> > even there there are problems (e.g., older audiences don't write
>> > comments on the internet, etc.).
>> >
>> > Perhaps the search for the view of the man on the street is itself
>> > problematic?
>> >
>> > Aaron Gerow
>> > Assistant Professor
>> > Film Studies Program/East Asian Languages and Literatures
>> > Director of Undergraduate Studies, Film Studies Program
>> > Yale University
>> > 53 Wall Street, Room 316
>> > PO Box 208363
>> > New Haven, CT 06520-8363
>> > USA
>> > Phone: 1-203-432-7082
>> > Fax: 1-203-432-6764
>> > e-mail: aaron.gerow at yale.edu
>> >
> 


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.service.ohio-state.edu/mailman/private/kinejapan/attachments/20060113/3a3fbe76/attachment.html