A Companion to Motion Pictures and Public Value

Collaborating with Torben Beck Jørgensen, Bozeman offers an inventory of public values based on an examination of about 230 studies (mostly articles) spanning the period of 1990–2003 and with a focus on public administration in the USA, the UK, and Scandinavia (Beck Jørgensen and Bozeman 2007, 357). The empirical data, then, is drawn from societies that “represent very different positions on the spectrum of the welfare state” (357). The researchers’ survey of the literature yields as many as 72 values that can be divided into a number of so-called constellations. In the first constellation, for example, we find values that are linked to the guiding idea that the public sector can and should contribute to society, to “the common good and to the public interest” (361). Based on their empirical survey, Beck Jørgensen and Bozeman conclude that “values are not considered equally important, that some values are so closely related that they seem to form clusters, and that values can be related to one another in a variety of different ways” (369–370). Especially significant is their finding that while government has a special role to play as the “guarantor of public values,” the latter are not in fact “the exclusive province of government” (373).

A Companion to Motion Pictures and Public Value affirms this latter point about the wider involvement of private actors in the creation of public value, the creation of public value being the responsibility of individuals and groups within both the private and public sectors. With reference, for example, to the actions of film producers, a conception of the causality of public value as encompassing the private sector arguably entails a heightened awareness of the seriousness of producing images for our various screens. As potential contributors to a common good and a good society (Hussain 2018), the decisions and actions of film producers merit assessment in terms of the extent to which they contribute to, or, as the case may be, obstruct the realization of values that are constitutive of our communities’ well-being. Viewers too participate in the realization of public value, for embedded in their responses to films are forms of affirmation or rejection related not only to the values on display but also, at least ideally, to the attitudes and practices underpinning the making of the works. These responses pertain to the creation of public value inasmuch as they have ramifications, for example, for the future scope of agency enjoyed by a given work’s producers. It is not a matter here of denying the reality of private lives, be it with reference to film producers or film spectators. Rather, the point is to foreground the public dimension of film production (including funding) and film spectatorship, the term “public” being an appropriate qualifier for state entities but also, as Jürgen Habermas (1989; Calhoun 1992) taught us, for the activities of individuals who rise above narrow self-interest and personal concern to contemplate, debate, and engage with matters of mutual interest. A Companion to Motion Pictures and Public Value offers an exploration of seven categories of value, each of them with a clear public dimension. We know that much work remains to be done: a number of key questions have yet to be asked, while others have been only partially answered. Yet, if Motion Pictures and Public Value inspires further research (of significant scope and scale) on how best to theorize, investigate, but also defend the ideally public dimension of screen content in various contexts, the volume will, we believe, have accomplished an urgent task.

1 1Neither Carroll nor Wolterstorff rule out the possibility that someone could make art in private; the point, rather, is that what it means to make art is socially established (and public in that sense).

2 2We are grateful to Paisley Livingston for a number of helpful corrections and insightful points from which this introduction has benefited. Any remaining mistakes are ours alone.

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