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
While we might assure ourselves that this is a woefully outdated perspective, aspects of it are clearly still with us, and the authors in this section make a number of points that bring its flaws into view. Perhaps most obviously, one might want to challenge the simplistic opposition between mass and high or folk culture. Khatereh Sheibani’s chapter on the aesthetics of Iranian cinema poses just such a challenge (albeit implicitly) by making a persuasive case that part of contemporary Iranian cinema’s value derives from its manifestation of aspects of Persian folk culture. One might also question the supposed necessity of an artwork offering an expression of an individual artist. In their chapter on distributed creativity in filmmaking practice, Karen Pearlman and John Sutton note how entrenched and pervasive this view remains today. From their interdisciplinary perspective, however, a conception of filmmaking as a collaborative enterprise with aims, intentions, and creativity distributed across a production team, is both more empirically accurate and conceptually sound. Moreover, Pearlman and Sutton argue for the centrality of the creative contributions by the sorts of “technicians” Macdonald seems to have in mind—in particular, editors. Paisley Livingston argues for a deflationary conception of art derived from Aristotle’s concept of techne, according to which art is a group of “purposeful human practices, each of which requires some level of acquired skill” (p. 31, this volume). Of course, if we think about art along these lines, there’s no reason to think that artmaking and commercial manufacture are incompatible; again, many mere “technicians” such as editors, camera operators, gaffers, sound recordists, etc. draw upon quite refined and specialized skill sets to work collaboratively toward a shared goal.
Still, other reasons have been proffered in defense of an opposition between commercial manufacture and bone fide art making. Another long-standing objection to motion pictures as art trades on the idea that it is not commercial manufacture per se that is the problem, but, more specifically, the mechanical nature of filmmaking and exhibition. As Rudolf Arnheim succinctly put it in his defense of film as art, the skeptic’s claim is, essentially: “Film cannot be art, for it does nothing but reproduce reality mechanically” ([1933] 1957, 8). Clearly there are connections between this objection to motion pictures as art and the one discussed above. Again, we see the implication that, by its nature, cinema prohibits the individual expression that is supposedly a sine qua non for art properly so-called. However, this objection is distinguished by its emphasis on the supposed fact that motion pictures are merely automatically created representations of reality.
According to the skeptic, motion pictures are basically like super-powered photocopiers: The interest we would properly take in a super-powered photocopy of a Frida Kahlo self-portrait would be in the aspects of the painting that the photocopy makes appreciable to us. It does not follow, however, that the photocopy is an artwork; the photocopy is merely an automatically generated reproduction of an artwork. Likewise, the skeptic might try to pump our intuitions by appealing to the case of video reproductions of theatrical performances. I can, for example, access a video recording of a performance of Yasmin Reza’s God of Carnage on YouTube. Clearly, however, the YouTube video of the performance of the play is not an artwork; it merely affords me access to the appreciable features of the performance, which is the artwork. (In fact, things are a little more complicated in this case because the performance is plausibly an artwork in its own right, distinct from the play.) According to this view, most cogently articulated by Roger Scruton ([1983] 2006), motion pictures are essentially like YouTube videos in just this sense: “if there is such a thing as a cinematic masterpiece it [is] because—like Wild Strawberries and La règle du jeu—it is in the first place a dramatic masterpiece” (19).2
Underlying Scruton’s claim is what Noël Carroll has usefully called “the aesthetic interest argument” (2008, 18–20). The aesthetic interest argument holds that because motion pictures are merely automatically created reproductions, we don’t take an interest in them for their own sake; rather, what we are interested in for its own sake—what we are interested in aesthetically—is what motion pictures reproduce. The traditional response to this sort of argument is best exemplified by Arnheim’s Film as Art ([1933] 1957), which extensively documents the various ways in which filmmakers skilfully manipulate aspects of film form so as to elicit aesthetic interest in films themselves and not just what they depict. The chapters by Pearlman and Sutton and by Sheibani make a similar point in different ways: Pearlman and Sutton highlight the enormous scope of possibilities through which members of a production team must work before deciding on a single particular way to present a simple dialogue scene; Sheibani notes that a number of Iranian filmmakers of the 1980s and 1990s “were zooming in on the mundanity of everyday life” and simultaneously creating extraordinarily poetic works. How? “Zooming in” is an apt metaphor because it suggests the significance of the filmmakers’ perspective, their selection and framing of the quotidian. In this case, our aesthetic interest is not in the mundanity of everyday life, per se, but in how the filmmakers present it to us—what significance they imbue it with.
Here we come to the difficult matter of aesthetic value—a topic that both Livingston and Parsons discuss at length. Influenced by the philosopher C.I. Lewis, Livingston conceives of aesthetic value (roughly speaking and with some important qualifications) as “an object’s power to occasion intrinsically valued experience, where this experience is not based on a moral or possessive attitude” (p. 39, this volume). So understood, aesthetic value is but one value that an artwork might have, and it is a value that might be found in many other contexts—most notably the environment. In his chapter, Parsons explores the historical resistance to the idea that the aesthetic value of the natural environment can be appreciated through motion pictures, and he challenges such scepticism regarding what he calls “the mediated appreciation of nature.” As Parsons notes, scepticism about the mediated appreciation of nature seems especially odd in light of Scruton’s aesthetic interest argument, according to which photographs and motion pictures should provide the ideal means for appreciating nature since we supposedly only take an aesthetic interest in what we see in them. Plausibly, however, it is precisely the objections to Scruton’s argument based in extensive documentation of photographs’ and motion pictures’ capacity for creative interpretation (and even manipulation) of
