A Companion to Motion Pictures and Public Value

When it comes to the public value of practitioners’ health, screen studies offers, not a field, but isolated accounts of relevant topics. Sylvia J. Martin’s (2012, 2017) comparative ethnographic research on the risks associated with stunt work in Hollywood and Hong Kong offers a rare and insightful take on the health and well-being of a particular category of film practitioners. Within the context of a discussion of Stanley Kwan’s Center Stage (1991), Hjort (2006) offers a perspective on the suicide of Chinese star Ruan Ying-lu in 1935 in terms of psychological risks linked to specific performance practices and the absence of formal training. And in recent times, the #Me Too movement has served to bring physical and psychological risks associated with the film industries into the foreground, with regulatory consequences in certain jurisdictions (Hjort 2018). However, what remain lacking are general as well as fine grained accounts of the health- and well-being related challenges and risks associated with filmmaking. With the film industry having to adjust to the challenges of COVID-19, the private and public value of filmmakers’ health and well-being are now set to become unavoidable topics.

In sum, a decade on from the pioneering conference in Turku, it is fair to say that research on how the motion pictures on our screens actually do contribute, or can and should contribute, to the public and private value of health remains unsystematic and surprisingly limited in scale, scope, and depth. One of the aims of A Companion to Motion Pictures and Public Value , then, is to suggest the contours of new and emerging motion-picture-based fields that have enormous potential and warrant a substantial investment of time, effort, and resources. Two such fields are filmmakers’ health and moving images for health and well-being. In the final section of A Companion to Motion Pictures and Public Value , the contours of the second of these two fields are evoked. The field of health, it should be noted, offers an especially dire example, but other areas are in similar need of attention. To achieve the necessary focus it is helpful to engage a team of researchers, in our case as many as 31, to begin to chart the diversity of film-related values and to flesh in the ways in which they are realized through motion pictures.

It is important to point out that the Turku conference by no means is an exception in terms of the sorts of lacunae identified above. The same absences are discernible in policy-oriented reports by the Arts Council of England that aim to capture the contributions of culture to society—“Understanding the Value and Impacts of Cultural Experiences: A Literature Review” (Carnwath and Brown 2014) and “The Value of Arts and Culture to People and Society: An Evidence Review” (Mowlah et al. 2014). Motion pictures are recognized in these reports as significant forms of cultural expression, yet the mentions of film are cursory and mostly merely indicative or suggestive. As a result, the phenomenon of motion pictures as bearers of diverse types of public value remains to be adequately explored.

These reports have, however, prompted some initiatives in film-related contexts. More specifically, referring to these reports, the Danish Film 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.

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.