To find that films have already ‘changed the world’, even in the vernacular sense of socio-political transformation implied by the question, you need look no further than, say, Kieslowski’s A Short Film About Killing. Released in Poland in 1988, it so shocked viewers that it launched a debate leading to the abolition of the death penalty in that country, which must have pleased the filmmakers. It may be due for a re-release, given the recent comments of the twin premiers Kaczynski. Or perhaps it would be more effective to enforce national programming of Cronenberg’s chilling identical twin flick Dead Ringers…

Kieslowksi’s film was an example, fairly rare in its clarity, of a film directly influencing pressure for social change. It wouldn’t be hard to argue, furthermore, that films are now deeply woven into the fabric of people’s desires, dreams, ideologies and everyday languages of symbolic exchange. It’s impossible to imagine a world without the moving image. And, increasingly, we are all becoming filmmakers in one way or another.

There is perhaps a deeper point to be made, though, about what the moving image can have to do with change. It’s not that films have changed the world, it’s that they are the world, or at least part of it. Which is to say, films automatically change the world because they are part of this changing world.

I make the point only because I wish to call attention to how deep the responsibility of the artist runs. The artist knows that, by representing something in an artwork, he is responsible both for reproducing and reflecting our judgement of the world, and at the same time changing that judgement, whether subtly or violently. The play between the two is the site of whatever ‘activism’ an artist might be said to partake in.

The artist – or the filmmaker – is a figure who can, in a single career and even in a single artwork, move easily between the sophomoric fantasy of rectifying the world through revolutionary upheaval, and the patriarchal fantasy of conserving and preserving what is valuable in it from the tidal morass of threatening, chaotic change. I’ve certainly harboured both these apparently opposed hopes for a single film.

Our metaphors of change are all verbal, active, to do with motion. But conservatism, the anti-revolutionary desire, the desire to stop the wheels of change, is also transformative. In a world which is constantly changing no matter what, a desire to arrest or repeal change is a desire to affect – or save – the world. Trying to preserve something is trying to change the fact that it will, inevitably, go the way of all things.

So the responsibility of the artist might feel itself at least as conservative as revolutionary. In this confusingly globalised, mobilised and millenarian world, the artist might wish to remember and preserve certain ‘fundamentals’ (I use the word advisedly), such as human intercourse, empathy, questioning, and openness to others. And so changing the world may simply be a question of reminding it of what it already ought to know – what it must not forget. The task of the artist here might be to conserve life, to oppose the terrifying acceleration of the post-human, an avaricious, objectifying death-drive out of all control. And also to oppose the familiar death’s head of violent revolution – especially when that revolution is in the name of a return to ‘fundamentals’.

Film is an immensely powerful medium, and, as such, it can be used to polemicise, to objectify, and to close down critical thought. Overt propaganda aside, films also play a major part in the welter of objectified imagery – objects of desire from the sexual to the political to the mundane. It thus contributes, as a medium, to our current unease, an unease writ large in the fundamentalist’s apparently opposed reaction to the same problem: to ban images or representations entirely.

There is something true and understandable in the prohibition against graven images: it recognises the power of he or she who represents. Like a worldmaker, or rather a lawmaker, the artist can steer us towards certain judgements, or else bring existing judgements into question. What my fundamentalist friends and I would consider ‘irresponsible’ probably differs a little, however. My idea of irresponsible art, if such a thing exists, is irresponsive art. Artworks that are insufficiently responsive to the world. Art that has already made up its mind, and yours. Ideological art, if you like.

Burning books is clearly not an option, however much the desire may sometimes strike me. The weapons of my holy war will not be violence, but, yes, you guessed it, more and better art. It’s true, film is powerfully able to objectify and to close down thought, and all too often that is precisely what it does. But a responsive filmmaker, aware of the power of his or her medium, can hope to make films that do the very opposite.

We are all judgement-making machines. No matter how open we may claim to be, when we encounter a stranger we do, at some level, judge them, even if only by categorising them. It is impossible not to judge. Language, the sine qua non of representation, lends itself automatically to judgement, categorisation, identification – ‘labelling’. Whereas art may be a way – perhaps the only way – of enabling us to suspend our judgements.

Films whose makers presuppose their formal or representational language as a ‘given’, even when their content is apparently beneficial, can be as much a part of the problem as anything else. Because films that ‘make a statement’, self-consciously political or otherwise, without questioning the very mode of engagement, can end up contributing to a stultifying logic of objectification such as reduces the possibilities for openness and free thought. I suppose I’m saying that some films seem to be blissfully unaware of their own representational status, or even of their status as ‘art’, thereby traducing that which the filmmaker has often set out to do.

Fundamentalists who like things that burn may have enjoyed the recent works of Al Gore, their fellow apocalyptic millenarian, on the subject of climate change. I hate to put the artists Gore and Kieslowski in the same sentence, but aren’t they both revolutionaries that are ‘changing the world’? Or conservatives who are ‘saving the world’? In any case, aren’t they responsibly nudging us toward beneficial socio-political action?

The jury on Gore will be out for a while, but note in the meantime a line used in the marketing of his Inconvenient Truth: ‘It will make you believe that a film can change the world!’

Apparently, the desired effect of this film is not to make you change the world, or even to make you want to change the world, but simply to make you believe that a film can change the world. See the film, in other words, and you’ll believe you don’t have to do anything at all. The film will do it for you. It’s out there, changing the world. For a couple of hours you felt scared, appalled and outraged at how much the world was about to change. For a couple of hours you watched the film and were determined to change yourself. And so, during the film, your world changed. Now you are saved and you can go home.

I find myself wondering, in other words, whether Gore the saviour is, like his fellow polemicist Michael Moore, engaged in appeals to change that actually stop certain other kinds of change from taking place.

In the Kieslowski film a young man murders a taxi driver, apparently for money, and is then put to a brief trial and then to death. It equates the murder of the state directly with criminal murder. If anything, state murder comes off the worse because it also carries with it a judgement, something that this film does so well to suspend. Herein lies the radical difference between art and propaganda.

An unflinching gaze at human action is the simple formal approach, and it is devastating. The criminal’s murder of the driver – an unbearably ugly strangulation that takes literally minutes to complete, in a single drawn-out take – immerses us in a sense of lived time that is truer, hence more horrifying, than any murder in a Hollywood film. We feel we are seeing with our own eyes, as witnesses, and must make up our own minds. At the end, we are the judges in a sense, but we feel, as if for the first time, the grave responsibility of that position, rather that the bloodlust of the polemicist’s rallying call to the barricades.

The state’s murder of the criminal by hanging is just as elongated, and somehow even more awful. We are forced to really see. Cinema above all the arts can make us literally see what we have done, what we are doing, what we could do. Cinema can and should unsettle and reconfigure our tired visions. Cinema should suspend judgement in the name of justice. To witness, that is to observe without immediately judging, brings us into a mode of compassion.

Sometimes the artistic suspension of judgement can itself be violent. But the artist ought to be the exact opposite of the terrorist, that literalist enforcer of a certain vision by the most violent means. The violence of the artist is a rupturing of representation away from the literal. It’s sad that on-screen violence is so rarely to this end.

I’m not making an argument for formalism or esotericism in film. But if the filmmaker fails to comprehend the potential of form, even if their ‘heart is in the right place’, they may achieve one kind of change at the expense of all others. They may successfully proselytise a message and engender mass conversions. But what gets lost in the process? Usually, the convert changes for once and for all. Opportunities for further change are now closed down. And a change that ends any further transformation is the kind of violence I can do without.

To which end, a final word about preaching to the converted. You could say that films which unsettle, which leave you open, which require something more of the audience, are never going to be as commercial as those that don’t. The filmmaker will reach only the ‘arthouse ghetto’. This is a genuine problem.

A teacher of mine, Stephen Cleary, compares the Greek idea of theatre with the Roman one that followed it. One was a cathartic and often dark emotional journey that refreshes the audience’s moral sense and place in the community. The other became a sex-and-violence spectacle pitched to the lowest common denominator of entertainment. The Greeks were arthouse and the Romans were multiplex, to the point of their eventual demise when spectacle could go no further (the snuff movie). The Roman coliseum was capitalistic – it always wanted to outdo last year’s spectacle in order to attract ever more punters – whereas the Greek audience was forced to attend the theatre for the civic good. Indeed, non-attendance was punishable by excommunication from the polis.

Sadly, I doubt it will be possible to force people into arthouse cinemas in quite the same way. But one can sneak the sometimes bitter medicine of art into areas not usually associated with it. I can report some minor success in this regard. I recently made a short film, Ex Memoria, a kind of liquid, post-Tarkovskian vision of an old woman with Alzheimer’s as she floats in and out of her memories and fantasies. Funded by the Wellcome Trust, it is being shown to thousands of care workers in residential care homes around the country as a way of raising questions about the old people they care for.

What exactly will be made of this lyrical and somewhat unsettling little art film by this atypical audience remains to be seen. This humble saviour is happy to report that early signs are ambiguous, but encouraging.

Josh Appignanesi is director of Song of Songs