2004; Nagib, Perriam, and Dudrah 2011; Stone et al. 2018). Indeed, the underlying premise of the volume is that an analytic project executed through the casting of a wide and inclusive cultural net is best able to yield an adequate understanding of the public value of the cinema.
Having emerged in the 1960s, film studies, and, more recently, screen studies, cannot be said entirely to have ignored the ways in which motion pictures are variously imbued with value, contribute value to a given society, or serve particular values. Three examples suggest how concepts of value, whether explicitly or implicitly, underpin vital areas of inquiry in this field. Let us, then, briefly evoke the research paradigms associated with useful cinema, radical/activist cinema, and state-supported filmmaking in small nations.
Field-defining edited volumes such as Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau’s Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media (2009); Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Streible’s Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film (2012); and Charles Acland and Haidee Wasson’s Useful Cinema (2011) effectively rescued non-theatrical filmmaking, with its “functional” (Acland and Wasson, 2) approach to motion pictures, from the margins of the discipline. Coined to identify the multiplicities of cinema’s functionalities, the term “useful cinema” is now one of screen studies’ key words. Describing useful cinema as “an enduring and stable parallel industry to the more spectacular realm of what we commonly think of as commercial film,” Acland and Wasson (2011, 2) essentially locate its specificity in its instrumental value. Associated, not with any particular mode of production, genre, or, even context of exhibition, useful cinema emerges, claim Acland and Wasson, when “institutions and institutional agents” adopt a particular “disposition” (2011, 4) toward the motion pictures in question. This stance is one that sees motion pictures as an effective means of achieving clearly defined goals, as “a tool that is useful, a tool that makes, persuades, instructs, demonstrates and does something” (2011, 6). Well-known instances of useful cinema include industrial films designed to train workers (Groening 2011), health films produced for the purposes of educating a population about matters of illness and health (Ostherr 2011), and films made to further the goals of museum educators (Wasson 2011). In each of these cases, motion pictures are a deliberately selected means to a desired end. Although Acland and Wasson do not use the term “instrumental value,” their references to functionality and tools strongly suggest a view of useful cinema as a repository of instrumental value harnessed to goals of public benefit.
If instrumental value is indeed a defining feature of useful cinema, those looking to further develop the analytic paradigm may be led to ask questions such as the following: is the sphere of commercial filmmaking, the contrast term for useful cinema, devoid of instrumental value? What do we make of those many instances in which well-established commercial directors and producers intentionally pursue profit (and other goals) through motion pictures? Is it not a matter here too of mobilizing motion pictures for instrumental purposes, of imbuing them with instrumental value, at the very least as a means of achieving economic gains? A charitable reading of the useful cinema paradigm might involve the extrapolation of an implicit stipulation to the effect that cinema becomes truly useful when it becomes a means of achieving goals that are inherently valuable, or of public or civic value. In this case, narrow economic gains would disqualify commercial cinema from inclusion in the category of useful cinema. Health films, on the other hand, might be seen as belonging squarely within the category of useful cinema, because they are a selected means of achieving the public value of health. Yet, as Kirsten Ostherr (2011) argues in her contribution to Useful Cinema, public health films may also serve the narrow interests of “insurance, dental, and medical establishments” (Acland and Wasson 2011, 9), even as they (appear to) promote health as a public value. This in turn suggests that public value can be pursued strategically or duplicitously or in ways that combine private and public interests. These remarks about the value-based dimensions of the useful cinema paradigm suggest that there is room for clarification, and, indeed, for a project in which the focus is fully on issues of public value, as these issues arise across the entire spectrum of filmmaking and across a range of different types of value.
A second example of film studies’/screen studies’ (more or less explicit) engagement with issues of public value is research devoted to radical film culture, including radical filmmaking and the practices of exhibition and distribution that support it. Countless are the authors and filmmakers who warrant more than a brief mention in the context of a discussion of radical film culture. For present purposes, however, it suffices to make reference to a recent relevant intervention in the area, Contemporary Radical Film Culture: Networks, Organisations and Activists, edited by Steve Presence, Mike Wayne, and Jack Newsinger (2020). The collaborative project finds its inspiration in the Radical Film Network. Established in 2013, the Radical Film Network is an organization that promotes radical filmmaking and radical film culture on a global basis. The global remit of this institutional source of inspiration is amply reflected in the volume’s various chapters, which jointly span Africa, Asia, China, Europe, the Middle East, as well as the Americas. In Hjort’s (2020) contribution, the issue of public value is explicitly evoked in connection with the features of activist film culture on the African continent. Hjort cites Mbye B. Cham’s evocation of a Fulani saying about art to describe one of the central tenets of activist filmmaking in Africa: “It is entertainment, it is educational and it is functional,” for “African cinema is integral to the wider social and collective effort on the part of Africans to bring about a better life for the majority of Africans” (Cham 1996, 4; cited in Hjort 2020, 101–102). Making reference to filmmaker Gaston Kaboré’s socially transformative talent development initiatives in the context of the alternative film school Imagine in Burkina Faso, to the rights- and social change-oriented priorities of the Zanzibar International Film Festival, to Kenyan Judy Kibinge’s social justice filmmaking, and to Cameroonian Jean-Marie Teno’s tireless commitment to filmmaking on behalf of truth, justice, and change, Hjort makes the point that African filmmakers offer the world a conception of filmmaking that is a precious ressource and genuine “source of public value” (Hjort 2020, 101). Imbued with entertainment, educational, and functional (or instrumental) value, as Mbye Cham would have it, African filmmaking often features a desire to effect change for the benefit of an entire community or public. Often neglected or marginalized in the more resource-intensive production milieux of the Global North, this understanding of the role played by moving images within the dynamics of community formation, nation building, and the construction of good societies is part of the normative impetus for A Companion to Motion Pictures and Public Value.
As in the case of useful cinema, the radical film culture paradigm invites questions about the public value of the cinema’s moving images, but does not explicitly establish a framework for the necessary considerations. Cited in the context of a discussion of activist filmmaking, Mbye Cham’s references to entertainment, education, and function suggest some of the many values that may be pursued through filmmaking and the wider institutional practices that sustain it. But what of other values that might be mediated by motion pictures? And how do various values relate to each other? How exactly are we to draw a line, even a fuzzy one, between values that somehow count as private as compared with public?
Our last example of a field of film studies/screen studies research that relies on intuitions about public value is that of small nation film studies (Hjort 2005; Hjort and Petrie 2007; Thomson 2018), especially as it relates to state-supported film industries. The history of state support, for example in the small nordic nation of Denmark from around 1960 onwards, is largely one of developing strategies and policies aimed at creating the conditions for a thriving film industry that can serve the public good. A key underlying premise is that in the absence of state support, filmmakers, and producers, facing punishing levels of global competition (Bondebjerg n.d.), would come to see filmmaking in and about the small nation as unsustainble. State funding, in effect, is about mitigating the systemic risks that are a feature of the terrain of small nation filmmaking (Hjort 2015). Justifications for state funding make reference to film as art, but often what is especially salient is the cultural, social, or political value that is to be derived from cinematic works reflecting the language, culture, history, and diversity of everday life in the small nation in question. Cinematic
