the preservation and further development of the various elements that make up a national culture. Also important are the ways in which filmmaking within and about the national space nurtures the self-understandings of viewers qua citizens and, furthermore, facilitates national conversations about matters of collective significance.
Reflecting on the defining tenets of nordic media studies, Kirsten Drotner (2020, np) foregrounds two notions: “One is a welfarist definition of culture as a common good and not, or not merely, as a commodity on a competitive market. […] The other notion […] is the definition of media as forms of culture in […] a legal, economic, organisational and social sense.” The welfarist definition (see also Syvertsen and Enli 2014) is seen as yielding a conception of cultural institutions as serving all citizens, including through a “diversity of cultural output and outlets.” The definition of film and other media as forms of culture has the effect of making them a source of “public value and not, or not merely” a source of “private gain” for investors. The welfarist and cultural definitions of film and other media, claims Drotner, are core elements in a public service paradigm that continues to be of great relevance. More specifically, this paradigm is shaped by ideals that are essentially normative (in the sense of contributing to what ought to be the case), thereby offering “a much-needed critical and ethical corrective” (Drotner 2020) to tendencies that eschew (explicitly) normative thinking about the whys and wherefores of cultural production.
Aims
A Companion to Motion Pictures and Public Value finds a starting point in a discernible film-related deficit in many government-driven discussions, reports, and conferences devoted to the value of culture, especially in the United Kingdom and the small nordic nations. Let us look at an example. In 2011 the University of Turku, Finland, organized a conference entitled “Culture, Health, and Well-being” in the context of the city’s successful bid for the status of European Cultural Capital that year. The point of this well organized, carefully designed, and forward-looking interdisciplinary conference was to bring together scholars, civil servants, and creative practitioners to explore the ways in which culture contributes to health and well-being. Music featured prominently in the discussions, as did theatre, dance, and the visual arts. Motion pictures, on the other hand, were less well represented, just as research related to the positive contributions of motion pictures to health and well-being was generally seen, quite rightly so, as substantially less developed than undertakings in a field such as music for health and well-being.
Health as a public value relates not only to the health-promoting results of practitioners’ efforts, to the music that emerges from the musicians’ playing or to the film that results from the coordinated work of a film crew, but also to the practitioners themselves. Here too, a glaring deficit is immediately discernible when comparisons between music studies and screen studies are undertaken. The public value of safeguarding and nurturing musicians’ health is well recognized—among other things through the development of health education for musicians (Matei et al. 2018) and the elaboration of substantial wellness-oriented guides to practice (Klickstein 2009). Filmmakers’ health, on the other hand, is a field that has yet to emerge in even the most preliminary of ways, a fact that was clearly evidenced by the program of the Turku conference which featured musicians’ (and dancers’) health prominently and left the reality of filmmakers’ health untouched.
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
