Most writings on the subject of motion pictures, including those scrutinizing the structural characteristics, aesthetic qualities, and effects of motion pictures on audiences, have traditionally been relatively abstract and have not considered what a film's audiences actually see. In fact, various external factors intervene between the filmmaker's intent and the audience's experience, often altering the qualities of a film and, consequently, the viewer's perception of it.

In the process of distribution, a film can be mutilated in many ways. The damage is most obvious when films in one language are shown to audiences that speak a different language. Subtitling may be simply incompetent, full of mistakes, or used for actual censorship. Dubbing—a significantly more profound intervention—can be even more damaging. Some films are reedited to render them "more understandable" by their target audiences, while others are given new titles rather than translations of their original titles, a practice that often creates false expectations and distorts the work's intent.

When a film is shown on television or video, it suffers the most extensive deformations. In addition to causing a loss of image size and definition, current mass-market television and video technology is harmful in other ways. These intrusions include advertisements that break the intended continuity, the superimposition of images—such as station identifications and weather bulletins—over parts of the picture, and spoken announcements over parts of the soundtrack considered by programmers to be "unimportant." Some alterations, such as a subtle increase in the projection speed of a televised movie to obtain more commercial time, are almost imperceptible but nonetheless detrimental to the integrity of a film.

It seems that audiences and even most film critics have tacitly accepted this situation—they rarely speak about it. This may be partly because of the special nature of film. In many other arts it is obvious that reproductions of a work are not the work itself, and they are not treated as such. However, the very nature of film makes it an exactly reproducible art form; under ideal conditions, each print is not merely a reproduction but is in fact another instance of the work itself. But we tend to overlook how rarely the ideal conditions apply, and this is disturbing for two reasons. First, professional analysis, interpretation, and evaluation may be unfair to filmmakers when—as is surprisingly often the case—they are based on a version that has already been seriously altered. Second, when critics' comments are based on original, uncompromised versions of the films, they may raise false expectations with regard to the more or less faulty versions that are often available to viewers.