Institute decided in 2016 to establish a “Valuation Task Force,” the mission of which would be to provide an evidence-based account of the ways in which moving pictures bring value to society. The coupling of the term “value” with “evidence-based” marked the beginning, as the DFI Board saw it, of a new way of thinking about the contributions of motion pictures. Rather than assume the positive impact of motion pictures based on purely philosophical, political, or ideological grounds, the aim was to undertake research of a more empirical nature, especially with regard to the notoriously difficult-to-measure longer-term effects of engaging with motion pictures over the course of a lifetime. While the DFI produces and supports excellent research, its principal mandate is to fund filmmaking and to support the preservation of film culture. Inasmuch as the same is true for the DFI’s counterparts in other parts of the world (which similarly have much at stake in the central question of film’s value), it is unsurprising that the need for substantial research focusing on the value of motion pictures remains to be met. It is our view that this need is best met through an internationally oriented, team-based effort drawing on the expertise of carefully selected scholars with the funding, methodological training, time, and established track records needed to undertake the envisaged research.
Motivating the design of A Companion to Motion Pictures and Public Value is an unshakeable belief in motion pictures as (potential) bearers of a variety of types of value. Some of these values are well recognized, entertainment value being a case in point. Yet, to allow only a small number of values to monopolize our attention is, ultimately, to restrict the potential of moving images to contribute to well lived lives and the development of societies that qualify as good in a number of critically important ways. If we lose sight of the diversity of values that motion pictures potentially realize, the sphere of practitioners’ agency shrinks, with filmmakers and their funders ever more likely to gravitate toward the realization of dominant values. A wide-ranging exploration of motion pictures and public value, we believe, helps to widen the scope of what we expect from the fare on our screens. What is more, this exploration challenges us to ask difficult questions, for example about the relative value of different kinds of values.
Approach
As the remit of the volume would suggest, the contributors hail from all over the world, geographically speaking, and all corners of the humanities (and, in some cases, beyond), institutionally speaking. The disciplines represented by the contributors include, of course screen studies (including film studies, television studies, media studies), as well as communications, cultural studies, environmental studies, literature, philosophy, and sociology. Among their number are three practitioners—that is, people for whom part of their job and professional identity is the creation of motion pictures.
On the one hand, the inclusion of practitioners (and scholar/practitioners) speaks to some of the practical aims of the project: We hope not just to describe the relationship between motion pictures and public value, but actively to contribute toward an ecology of motion pictures production that is driven by considerations of the common good. On the other hand, the pursuit of normative ideals or, indeed, values that are essentially normative demands some consideration of the nature of those ideals and values at a fairly general or abstract level. Typically, this sort of work falls within the purview of philosophy—in particular, “value theory,” which includes aesthetics and ethics.
Somewhere in between the practical concerns of implementing or realizing certain values in the production of motion pictures and the philosophers’ general questions about how to understand the nature and warrant of those values, there are a number of middle-level research questions to be asked about the historical relationship between motion pictures and public value, their contemporary relationship, and what their future relationship ought to look like. The sorts of questions we might pose at this middle-level of generality are diverse and answering them thus requires a diverse collection of methods. Some questions might require historical research, including, but not limited to archival research. Other questions might need to be addressed via close analysis of a specific group of motion pictures, and, depending on the research question, such a group might be defined by language, nation and/or origin (or reception), medium (or artform), mode of production (i.e., commercial, public, private, independent), and so forth. And still other questions involving the reception of motion pictures might need to appeal to the methods of the psychological sciences or of cultural studies, depending on what aspect of reception is under investigation.
What then, if anything, do the various methods and approaches taken by the contributors in this volume have in common? Arguably, it is their analytical orientation, as we suggested above. By “analytical,” we mean relating to analysis in the sense of a detailed and careful examination of a particular phenomenon. We might also add that in the chapters collected here, such analysis tends to be question- or problem-driven and the point or purpose of the analysis is clarificatory or explicative. In other words, although the project is explicitly underpinned by a commitment to particular ideas and values, this commitment exists at a quite general level and underdetermines the kinds of methodological or disciplinary-specific commitments that one might find in another edited collection. For example, our project might, methodologically speaking, be contrasted with an edited collection that was oriented around, say, actor-network theory; in such a volume, the contributors might be committed to a fairly specific doctrine and then proceed to offer a hermeneutic exploration of a text or group of texts on that basis. In contrast, the contributors to A Companion to Motion Pictures and Public Value tend to limit their doctrinal commitments and, instead, avail themselves of those methods or approaches that are most suited to exploring a particular research question or problem analytically in the sense described above.
Explicating Key Concepts
Our goal in this part of the introduction is to offer some preliminary characterisations of the key concepts of our project—motion pictures, public value, and value. Our discussions will necessarily be brief here, but we hope at least to canvas some of the general theoretical issues tied to these concepts and to clarify both the sense in which we are using them and the extent to which our use of them involves particular theoretical commitments.
Motion Pictures
In this volume, we understand and use the term “motion pictures” capaciously. Included in the category of motion pictures are fictional films, documentary films, interactive documentaries, instances of virtual reality (VR) “filmmaking,” television advertising, and fiction and documentary television series. Likewise, we use the term “television” in a broad sense to include not just the content that we watch on physical televisions, but also the streamed “television” content of providers like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Disney +, and so forth, as well as independently produced and distributed web-series and web-videos. “Screen media” might be another term that roughly picks out the sorts of phenomena under discussion here.
Yet, we have elected to use the term “motion pictures” rather than “screen media” or similar terms in part because the concept of “motion pictures” has been most thoroughly theorized and defended as a coherent category. Here we have in mind the philosopher Noël Carroll’s definition of motion pictures (or “moving images”, as he variously calls them) in his 2008 volume, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures. Carroll’s definition is somewhat technical, and we will leave it to interested readers to explore its details (2008, 53–79), as well as alternative accounts (e.g. Ponech 2009, 52–63). The key point in this context is that Carroll’s inquiry moves beyond the historically prominent question “what is cinema?” (posed most notably by French film critic and theorist André Bazin) in a way that allows us to recognize the commonalities between “cinema” and similar media such as television, VR, and the like.
In more ambitious moments, Carroll even urges us to “forget the medium” and focus on the broader category of moving images (or motion pictures) (2003, 1–9). Underlying Carroll’s entreaty is a worry that talk of medium-specific features of cinema, television, and the like is bound up with dubious metaphysics—namely, the doctrine of medium essentialism, according to which media