Film

All around the globe, film is a hugely popular means of entertainment and a powerful educational medium. It has a prime cultural function as a way of us telling our stories in drama and in documentary form - from the time the Lumiere brothers held the first commercial public screening of projected moving pictures (termed actualities) in Paris at the end of 1895, we have been fascinated with seeing ourselves, our lives and our places on screen.

Film is also an art form. Some say it was the most significant development in art in the twentieth century. Moving image artists experiment with the film medium in a variety of ways – through their use of content (e.g. narrative structure) and form (e.g. use of light, composition, colour) and increasingly work with other artists to combine film (now most commonly in digital format) with other art forms to produce multimedia works.

Film is also an industry, a business like any other where money can be made and lost. Any serious study of film must take into account this aspect of film and ask the questions – How do people get money to make their films? How do they get their films distributed and shown? Who makes money if a film is really successful? And who loses money if it’s not?

Scholars will also ask – What films are made in this culture? What do the films tell us about the culture that produced them? What meanings do audiences make from these films? 

Ironically, the word ‘film’ is on the way to becoming a misnomer, as digital technologies completely overturn how films are made, distributed, exhibited and watched. Those technologies have also made film-making, an activity once restricted to the passionate few, an activity that we can all take part in at little cost. It is cheaper to watch a film on DVD than to go to the movies. And there’s always YouTube.

What does all this mean for ‘the film industry’? Will it die out and if it does, what will evolve to take its place?