ABSTRACT
Right from the beginning of its emergence as a new cultural form, debates around film turned on the question of how its formal features could qualify it as an art form. In interrogating this legitimate question, early theorists and filmmakers were exploring the expressive possibilities of the medium, what the eighteenth-century German philosopher Kant termed in relation to art as the ‘play of forms’. In one of the best general introductions to the political economy of communication, Vincent Mosco situates the mode of analysis within the tradition of social, economic and political analysis founded by eighteenth-century thinkers, such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo. They set out to map the new capitalist society that had established itself. But they were followed in the nineteenth century by outright critics of capitalism, especially Marx and Engels. Film form and film industry mediate what is happening in the wider culture.
