These days when it seems impossible to get outside the front door without falling over a film crew, the number of new films being made is equalled only by the number of seminars and conferences charting this groundswell of activity. Two recent events attempted to navigate their way through the minefield of competing terms like art cinema, cultural cinema, independent cinema, underground cinema and so on. In doing so their implicit aim was to delineate what it is that mainstream cinema, commercial cinema or Hollywood cinema lacks that these alternative film practices are intending to make up for, and perhaps even more importantly, if these films are so culturally valuable then why it is so difficult to distribute them and to reach an audience.

It is traditional for these kind of events to start pessimistically and these two were no exceptions. "Art Cinema" revealed that the new cinema multiplexs were planning to marginalise art films further by having separate entrances for the art house screens, and "By Any Means Necessary" began with pre-publicity stating that 70% of films in the London Film Festival would not reach cinema screens in the UK due in part to the fact that distributors prepared to take on "cultural films" had all but dried up. It is also traditional at these events for there to be at least some attempt to define what is "art cinema" or "cultural cinema", and at the "By Any Means Necessary" seminar at least, this attempt converged surprisingly quickly onto a working definition. This was that cultural films are films which are made for intentions other than just to make money - they have other cultural values. But this definition also reflected the differing focus of the two seminars - "By Any Means Necessary" concentrated squarely on the distribution and exhibition of films, and the limitations of this definition became clearer when some of the panelists tried to expand it. Pierre Menahem of the sales agency Celluloid Dreams proposed that art films were the films that distributors didn't want and Lawrence Garnall from The Feature Film Company declared that art films were the films that didn't make money, and that if they did happen to make money then their cultural status tended to diminish proportionately.

Lying behind much of these discussions is always the uncomfortable thought that if the cinematic experience provided by the art film is really that important then why aren't people queuing up to see them in droves? Can we really explain this through some kind of conspiracy to prevent art films reaching the screen or will they always be unpopular? In fact cinema going, like all other forms of popular culture, possesses a social dynamics which makes it a product of complex forces. For example, Theodore Adorno liked to point out that the reason why the working classes loved the easy escapism of mass media was that because their daily lives were so much harder than the intelligentsias they had to have some form of emotional release just to get through the week with their sanity intact. According to this view a cultural elite became the guardians of cultural values that the lower classes would never be able to appreciate under the prevailing social conditions. But like many such theoretical approaches this merely becomes an excuse for accepting the status quo. Practitioners need theories that put film making into a wider and more informed context but that also enable them to move forward. Shouldn't we expect some flexibility in peoples viewing habits - like finding the point where escapism meets imagination, where spectacle meets shock, where feeling meets thinking?

As the day wore on at "Art Cinema", a series of debates tried to explore the particular differences between the commercial film and the art film. Three main positions were discernible here as to what the role of cultural film was and why it was important to oppose its marginalisation by the Hollywood "product". Michel Ciment the French cinema critic most forcibly stated the idealist position. For him cultural film possesses intrinsic artistic values in contrast to Hollywood films which are designed to appeal to twelve year old American boys. In the 1960s mass film education created audiences for auteur film makers like Antonioni and Fassbinder but this programme has since been dismantled. Another argument which has almost become the de facto response when intellectuals are put in a corner and which surfaced in various guises at various points in both seminars was that of cultural diversity. We need to have a balanced film culture where mainstream and cultural films are both available and to retain opportunities for widely different approaches to film making. Lastly there is what we might call the materialist approach which was best represented by producer Keith Griffiths. Art film making is like a research and development arm of film production in which radical new ideas are allowed to be tried out. If successful they might spread and benefit the whole film industry which might otherwise stagnate for lack of inspiration...

Richard Wright