A Companion to Motion Pictures and Public Value

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Ted Nannicelli and Mette Hjort

Perhaps it will strike readers as odd that widespread acceptance of motion pictures as an art form is a relatively recent development—one that emerged out of a century-long debate about whether motion pictures could be art and, if so, under what conditions (see, e.g., Canudo [1911] 1980; Lindsay [1915] 2000; Arnheim [1933] 1957; Perkins 1972; Sesonske 1974; Scruton [1983] 2006; Carroll 1988.) With the benefit of the knowledge that movies and television were the dominant popular art forms of the 20th century, it may seem obvious that we value motion pictures as artworks and, furthermore, that this is often because of the aesthetic pleasure they afford.

However, such an apparently casual observation immediately raises a number of complex questions: On what conception of “art” and under what conditions are motion pictures artworks? What does it mean to say that we value a motion picture as an artwork, or to say that it has artistic value ? How does artistic value relate to aesthetic value? And in what ways do the artistic value and aesthetic value of motion pictures depend upon things like the content of what they represent, their means of representation, their generative history or immediate production context, and the wider socio-historical contexts of their production and reception? The chapters in this section explore all of these questions in detail; our aim here is to do some stage setting.

To begin, it is worth briefly revisiting the question of whether motion pictures can be art because the positions in this debate constitute the backdrop for some of the discussion in the chapters by all four of the authors in this section. From the start, proponents of the view that cinema could be art anticipated objections. Consider, for example, this statement from one of the earliest cases for film as art—Vachel Lindsay’s The Art of the Moving Picture : “Let us take for our platform this sentence: THE MOTION PICTURE ART IS A GREAT HIGH ART, NOT A PROCESS OF COMMERCIAL MANUFACTURE” ([1915] 2000, 30). Even in his defense of cinematic art, Lindsay accepts a dichotomy that skeptics of motion picture art (and mass art more generally) would seize upon time and time again. Implicit in this dichotomy is the premise that commercial production and art are mutually exclusive. A pithy and forceful statement of this comes from Dwight Macdonald, who claims that, since the mid 19th century, “Western culture has really been two cultures: the traditional kind—let us call it ‘High Culture’—that is chronicled in the textbooks, and a ‘Mass Culture’ manufactured wholesale for the market” (1953, 1). Moreover, Macdonald claims, “Mass Culture has developed new media of its own, into which the serious artist rarely ventures: radio, the movies, comic books, detective stories, science fiction, television” (1953, 1).

For what reasons might one think that commercial manufacture and genuine artmaking are mutually exclusive? One reason, offered by Macdonald himself, is that commercial manufacture precludes individual expression or expression of “the folk,” which is putatively a necessary condition for creating bone fide art. According to Macdonald, “the essential quality of Mass, as against High or Folk, Culture [is that] it is manufactured for mass consumption by technicians employed by the ruling class and is not an expression of either the individual artist or the common people themselves” (1953, 3). 1