ABSTRACT
Film is an economic commodity as well as a cultural good. As a commodity, film, like other manufactured objects, has been brought about by the labour of many workers with no personal relationship or connection existing between them and those who will end up using or ingesting the commodity. Manufactured goods exist in successive moments of production, distribution and consumption. ‘Consumption’ applied to material goods refers to that kind of appropriation whereby the object is digested or used so that it is subject to physical decay and disintegration. Cultural goods such as films are not subject to the same laws of entropy. While the material bearer or carrier of the cultural good, in this case a reel of celluloid or a length of videotape, will suffer the same fate as other material goods, the cultural object will not be affected for new copies can be struck from the original. Rather, the consumption of cultural objects refers to the dimension of their ideological meanings and focuses on the moment of decoding. While this dualism of materiality and meaning, commerce and culture, is repeatedly insisted upon in the chapters that follow, nevertheless it is worth remembering that the material existence of a film is a prior, necessary condition to its capacity to engender any ideological effects. In other words, before film can be considered as a cultural object, it must first be conceived as an industry.
