Films do the things we have no other word for but art

The argument

A second argument proceeds from what films do to the people who watch them. Proponents point out that a particular vocabulary is reserved for a narrow class of experiences: being changed by something, seeing a familiar thing newly, grasping something about other people that could not have been put as a proposition, returning to a work years later and finding it different because we are. That vocabulary is not ordinarily used of amusements. It is used of novels, paintings, buildings and music, and it is used, by audiences with no theoretical interest in the question, of films. Proponents argue that this is not loose talk, because the mechanism is open to inspection. A film can hold a viewer in another person's position for two hours, giving them that person's information, sightlines and rhythm, and can then withdraw the position to show what it concealed. It can set an image against a sound so that neither means what it would mean alone. It can make a viewer complicit in something and then make them notice. These are not side effects of storytelling; they belong to a medium that controls what is seen, for how long, in what order and against what accompanying sound. The conclusion proponents draw concerns the burden of argument. A practice that produces objects of sustained interpretive attention, which do to audiences what art does and by means available in no other medium, is art unless some further criterion is produced to exclude it. Proponents argue that the criteria usually offered, such as commercial production or mass popularity, would also exclude a great deal of what nobody disputes is art.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics reply that the test proposed is too weak to distinguish anything. Audiences describe advertisements, sporting contests and fairground rides in the same elevated terms, and the effects named here, immersion in another position and the management of attention, are precisely the techniques of persuasion and of entertainment. On this account intensity of response is evidence of effective engineering rather than of art, and the fact that commercial production does not disqualify every work still leaves open the question of what an industry organised around return on investment is actually making.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Audiences use that vocabulary freely of advertisements, sporting contests and amusement rides, so its application to films shows how people talk rather than what films are. [Rejecting P2] Holding a viewer in another position and controlling what is seen and heard are the standard techniques of immersion and persuasion, and effectiveness at them is engineering rather than art. [Rejecting P3] The objection is not commercial production as such but the fact that in film the commercial calculation determines the finished work, which is not true of the undisputed art the premise invokes. [Rejecting C] The premises establish that films affect people powerfully, which no one denies, and not that the effect is of the kind art produces.