Читать книгу A Companion to Motion Pictures and Public Value - Группа авторов - Страница 16

In this volume, we understand and use the term “motion pictures” capaciously. Included in the category of motion pictures are fictional films, documentary films, interactive documentaries, instances of virtual reality (VR) “filmmaking,” television advertising, and fiction and documentary television series. Likewise, we use the term “television” in a broad sense to include not just the content that we watch on physical televisions, but also the streamed “television” content of providers like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Disney +, and so forth, as well as independently produced and distributed web-series and web-videos. “Screen media” might be another term that roughly picks out the sorts of phenomena under discussion here.

Yet, we have elected to use the term “motion pictures” rather than “screen media” or similar terms in part because the concept of “motion pictures” has been most thoroughly theorized and defended as a coherent category. Here we have in mind the philosopher Noël Carroll’s definition of motion pictures (or “moving images”, as he variously calls them) in his 2008 volume, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures. Carroll’s definition is somewhat technical, and we will leave it to interested readers to explore its details (2008, 53–79), as well as alternative accounts (e.g. Ponech 2009, 52–63). The key point in this context is that Carroll’s inquiry moves beyond the historically prominent question “what is cinema?” (posed most notably by French film critic and theorist André Bazin) in a way that allows us to recognize the commonalities between “cinema” and similar media such as television, VR, and the like.

In more ambitious moments, Carroll even urges us to “forget the medium” and focus on the broader category of moving images (or motion pictures) (2003, 1–9). Underlying Carroll’s entreaty is a worry that talk of medium-specific features of cinema, television, and the like is bound up with dubious metaphysics—namely, the doctrine of medium essentialism, according to which media are individuated by their unique, timeless essences. Carroll has lodged a number of devastating objections to medium essentialism (e.g., 2003, 1–9, 2008, 35–52) and we would certainly want to distance ourselves from that doctrine. However, we are not convinced of Carroll’s suggestion that medium-specificity claims—claims about particular tendencies or affordances of, say, television versus film, or interactive documentary versus traditional documentary—are necessarily underpinned by medium essentialism and, thus, illicit or false (see Nannicelli 2017, 51–87; Smith 2006). On the contrary, we will work on the assumption that there is a metaphysically neutral or innocuous way of understanding such medium-specificity claims, which seems necessary to make sense of the plausible arguments made by a number of our contributors that the affordances or capacities of new media (e.g., interactive documentaries, VR) often raise new ethical challenges or create new possibilities for realizing value in the domains of politics, the environment, health, and so forth.