What a film finally looks like is decided by financing, scheduling and audience testing

The argument

Those who deny that cinema is art direct attention away from the techniques and towards the conditions under which films are made. A feature film is an industrial product: financed on a projection of return, cast partly for the audience a performer brings, shot to a schedule set by the cost of each day, cut to a length that permits a given number of showings, tested on preview audiences and recut where they respond badly, and released on a date chosen against competitors. Proponents argue that where these are the decisive constraints, the finished object is not the realisation of anyone's vision but the output of a process designed to maximise receipts. The second point concerns authorship. Art, on this view, involves an intention carried through into a work. A film is made by many hundreds of people under contract, with authority over final changes resting with those who put up the money, and with the person usually credited as its author frequently overruled. Proponents argue that a practice in which the work can be reshaped after completion by people with no artistic role at all is a manufacturing practice that employs artists, which is a different thing from an art form. The position allows for exceptions and regards them as marginal. Where a film is made outside those constraints, with small sums and no obligation to recoup, proponents are often willing to call the result art. Their claim concerns the medium as it actually operates: that what gets made, and how it ends, is determined by commerce, and that calling the industry as a whole an art form flatters it.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Those who hold that cinema is art argue that the constraints described are not peculiar to film. Painters worked to commission on subjects, sizes and deadlines set by patrons who could reject the result; composers wrote to order for churches and courts; architects have always built for whoever pays. On that account commissioning and constraint are the ordinary conditions of art rather than its negation, and the question is what gets made under them. They add that the argument proves too much: by its own logic a rare independently financed film would be art while an identically composed studio film would not.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Commissioning, deadlines, fixed dimensions and patron approval were the ordinary conditions of painting, music and architecture for centuries, so commercial constraint does not mark film out. [Rejecting P2] Final authority resting with a financier describes who may veto a work, not who made it, and vetoed or altered works are still assessed as art elsewhere. [Rejecting P3] The premise defines art so that only unconstrained production counts, which would disqualify most of what is securely regarded as art and so proves too much. [Rejecting C] The conclusion follows only if commercial determination is incompatible with art, which the premises assert rather than establish.