An Introduction to Studying Popular Culture

Dominic Strinati

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136207525
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

How can we study popular culture? What makes 'popular culture' popular? Is popular culture important? What influence does it have?
An Introduction to Studying Popular Culture provides a clear and comprehensive answer to these questions. It presents a critical assessment of the major ways in which popular culture has been interpreted, and suggests how it may be more usefully studied.
Dominic Strinati uses the examples of cinema and television to show how we can understand popular culture from sociological and historical perspectives.

chapter 1

Popular cinema

The Hollywood system

■ The rise of the Hollywood studio system

■ The emergence of cinema

■ Early popular cinema

■ The coming of sound

■ The studio system

■ The decline of the studio system

■ The package-unit system

THESE OPENING CHAPTERS examine the economic, cultural and social significance of Hollywood cinema as a type of popular culture. They try to assess some of the characteristic features which have been associated with its development, and the power it exercises. The intention, in presenting an introductory study of Hollywood cinema, is to show how a highly significant popular cultural institution has, and can be, assessed. Hollywood cinema was one of the earliest and most significant developments in the production and consumption of popular culture in the twentieth century. It has since had a general and continuing influence on the popular culture which has come to dominate the modern, industrialised world. It has influenced the ways popular culture is financed, produced, marketed, promoted and consumed. It has played a powerful role in the development of the standard genres into which popular culture has been divided. It has left an almost indelible mark on our understanding of what counts as audience pleasure. It has been centrally involved in the ideologies which have shaped, and been shaped by, these processes. It therefore seems useful to discuss some of the key aspects of contemporary popular culture by looking at Hollywood cinema.

The rise of the Hollywood studio system

We shall start by outlining the rise and fall of the Hollywood studio system. This should convey how Hollywood cinema has been formed by its organisation of the production, distribution and exhibition of films, and how the system it established has developed and changed over time.¹ This outline should provide a basis for the subsequent discussion of narrative, ideology and genre, as well as identifying some of the key features associated with the study of popular cinema.

The film industry is made up of at least three separate activities: the making or production of films; their distribution to points of exhibition (theatres and cinemas); and their being shown, or exhibited, to a paying audience. Both distribution and exhibition are linked by the promotion of films to the public, and production is clearly associated with technological changes. However, these three processes describe the basics of the industry. The important thing to note about the early film industry is that, for the most part, the production, distribution and exhibition of films were conducted as separate business ventures. The rise of the studio system refers to the economic integration of these three processes. As such, ‘oligopoly control through ownership of production, distribution and exhibition represented the full-grown Hollywood studio system’ (Gomery 1986: 3). The studio system took thirty years to form, during which time the ‘fairly competitive’ film industry was turned into ‘a tightly held trust’. It reached the peak of its supremacy between the late 1920s and the early 1950s, when Hollywood came to dominate the ‘world mass entertainment business’ (ibid.: xi, 3, 189). Crucially, as is usually the case, ‘it was the profit motive that dictated the nature of film production, distribution and exhibition in the United States during the studio era’ (ibid.: xi, 1–2).

The studio system is a narrow definition since the system involved more than merely the use of studios for producing films. It refers to large corporations (eight in all, five ‘major’, three ‘minor’) producing profits for each other by acting jointly in controlling not just production but distribution and exhibition as well. ‘The fundamental source’ of the ‘power’ of these corporations, in particular the five ‘majors’, was not provided by ‘Hollywood production’. ‘Rather, their worldwide distribution networks afforded them enormous cost advantages and their theater chains provided them direct access to the box office’ (Gomery 1986: 2). To some extent, the term Hollywood itself was always something of a misnomer. This is partly because the power of the corporations lay not in their production base in Los Angeles and southern California, but in ‘the total and necessary corporate cooperation which existed on the levels of distribution and exhibition’. But it was also because real control was exercised from New York. Indeed, the mystique and fantasy associated with ‘the concept’ of ‘Hollywood’ is ‘perhaps … the greatest corporate creation of the studio system’ (ibid.: 193–4).

The system was challenged in the late 1940s by declining audiences, the rise of television and anti-trust action aimed at breaking the industry’s oligopoly by divesting the majors of their control over exhibition. This period marked the decline of the studio system as it had operated during its heyday. The majors soon adapted to changing conditions with the emergence of the ‘package-unit’ system. For example, only RKO, among the majors, went out of business; the rest continued, sometimes under different owners (Gomery 1986: xi). Most importantly, even if they lost overt control of exhibition, they retained their power base in distribution.

The emergence of cinema

While it will be necessary to fill in some of the detail as we go along, this is the basic outline of the Hollywood studio system and we need to keep it in mind during the following discussion. The development of the factors referred to here, as well as others, need to be considered when outlining the origins and development of the American film industry.

It has been argued that recognising certain physical and optical properties can help us understand the origins of cinema. There is little doubt, for example, that two ‘optical principles’ of human perception make cinema as we know it possible. These are ‘persistence of vision’ and ‘the phi phenomenon’. The former refers to how ‘the brain retains images cast upon the retina of the eye for approximately one-twentieth to one-fifth of a second beyond their actual removal from the field of vision’. This allows viewers to see the images projected by a reel of film, without noticing the black spaces between the images. The second refers to how we can see the ‘blades of a rotating fan as a unitary circular form or the different hues of a spinning color wheel as a single homogeneous color’. This ‘creates apparent movement from frame to frame at optimal projection speeds of 12 to 24 fps’ for viewers of films (Cook 1990: 1).

These features enable us to watch films and have been necessary for the development of cinema. They are physical pre-requisites for watching films. But while they are basic in this sense, it has not really been claimed that they can account for the emergence of cinema. It is also not clear that this claim could be supported if it were to be put forward. However, Carroll, for example, has tried to relate the ‘power of movies’ to biological and psychological capacities. He does not directly address the origins of cinema, but his case is relevant to this issue. He argues that the power of films, how they have become ‘a worldwide phenomenon’, arises from ‘pictorial recognition’. This relies upon ‘a biological capability that is nurtured in humans as they learn to identify the objects and events in their environment’. As such, it ‘is a function of the way stroboscopic or beta phenomena affect the brain’s organization of congruous input presented in specifiable sequences to different points on the retina’ (1996a: 81). While not wishing to reduce the power of films completely to biological and psychological phenomena (ibid.: 92), he does use this argument to criticise the idea that ‘pictures … are matters of codes and conventions’ (ibid.: 81). Instead, ‘the power of movies’ is determined by the capacity of human perception as described above.

The critical problem here is that we are talking about a fairly permanent biological capacity for pictorial recognition, irrespective of whether it is related to the power of films, or the origins of cinema. Presumably it is not something that can spring into existence quickly. How then can it explain the emergence of cinema in the late nineteenth century, its subsequent world-wide prevalence and the power it has been able to exercise since its invention? This capacity is a pre-requisite, a necessary condition for cinema, but it can hardly qualify as an explanation of the power or origins of cinema and the patterns that marked its subsequent development. The commercial and technological activities of the industrial, capitalist societies within which cinema emerged, as Burch for example suggests, would seem to provide a better basis for explaining the emergence of cinema. To some extent, the very idea of cinema reflects this in that its first appearance is defined by the presentation of a film to a paying audience. The biological capacity to watch films provides no reason to suppose that the cinema would ever have been invented. An understanding of its origins must therefore be related to the societies in which it emerged, though, even in this case, it cannot be assumed that its invention was inevitable.

A useful and contrasting case is put forward by Burch. He argues that the emergence of cinema involved ‘the establishment of a mode of representation’ which was ‘historically and culturally determined’, and which has continued to exert its power over cinema ever since (1978: 92, cf. 91). This is a large task and Burch makes some initial and tentative suggestions about the forces which helped condition the emergence of cinema, and some of the features which this cinema took.

He identifies ‘three forces or historical and cultural trends which moulded the cinema during its first two decades’ (Burch 1978: 93). The first was ‘the folk art kept alive by the urban working classes in Europe and the United States at the turn of the century’. This consisted of ‘modes of representation and narrative’ from such areas as ‘melodrama, vaudeville, pantomime (in England), music hall’, ‘fairground acts’, and various kinds of street entertainment. These were linked as ‘cause and effect’ to cinema, because ‘in its early days’ it ‘addressed itself exclusively to the urban “lower classes”’ and ‘its practitioners were for the most part “of humble origin”’ (ibid.).

However, cinema was emerging within a capitalist society, which meant that the ‘second force’ to which it was subject was ‘the underlying pressures exercised by the specifically bourgeois modes of representation’. These were drawn ‘from literature, painting and especially the theatre’ (Burch 1978: 93). Burch sees this mode as being defined by such features as ‘linearity, haptic screen space and the individualisation of characters’. These were only intermittently present in early cinema, dominated as it was by ‘elements’ of ‘popular origin’. However, this situation was ‘gradually reversed between 1908 and 1915’ due to ‘the economic development of the cinema and the resulting need to attract an audience with more money and leisure at its disposal’ (ibid.: 94). Thus, the features of the bourgeois mode became the defining features of the cinema’s subsequent, and dominant, institutional mode of representation.

The ‘third force’ Burch identifies is ‘scientistic’, which ‘figured as an element of dominant ideology’, but ‘was also linked to genuinely scientific practices’. It refers to the disinterested, scientific approach to technical innovations. For example, ‘on a strictly technological level, the first moving pictures came most directly out of experiments by Muybridge, Marey and other researchers whose goal was most certainly not the restitution or representation of movement, but simply its analysis’ (1978: 94). For a time, this force worked in association with that exerted by popular representations and against the bourgeois mode, in giving shape and direction to early cinema. However, the commercial potential of cinema eventually facilitated the dominance of the bourgeois, or institutional mode of representation (ibid.: 94–5).

These conditions thus led to a particular type of cinema. This developed out of the pre-institutional mode, or what Burch calls ‘primitive cinema’. With this cinema, films lacked ‘continuity links, either spatial or temporal’, had ‘several actions going on at once’ and were marked by an ‘acentric, non-directive composition’ (Burch 1978: 95, 97, 99). It was a collective, non-linear and non-standardised cinema. The institutional mode of representation which replaced early cinema has proved to be very different. It has fostered a linear, narrative and standardised cinema. The institutional mode involves a clearly linear narrative which subordinates time and space to the recounting of a story. It entails a narrative logic in which the scenes or events, which are individualised, build to a clear and unambiguous ending, or what is called narrative closure.² This is ‘the linearity of the institutional mode’ (ibid.: 99, cf. 97–103). This mode began to be established in the early part of the twentieth century. One of its first examples, cited by Burch, was The Great Train Robbery (1903) (ibid.: 100).³ Once firmly established by about 1915 (ibid.: 94), it has been with us ever since.

There are clear comparisons to be made between this argument and that put forward by Bordwell et al. (1985). What they both tend to show is how the experiments and lack of standardisation, which characterised early cinema, eventually gave way to the established routines and norms that have governed film making to the present day. The working assumptions and practices which emerged with the institutional mode, or ‘classical Hollywood cinema’, have continued to be followed as the particular circumstances which gave rise to them have gradually disappeared.

Early popular cinema

The emergence of cinema can therefore be seen as an industrial, technological, narrational and commercial phenomenon. These factors were linked to an emergent public interest in visual spectacle as a type of mass entertainment. This interest had been stimulated by the invention of photography and the popularity of machines at public amusements, such as the kinetoscope, which provided the illusion of moving images. Edison’s invention of the kinetoscope in the late 1880s meant that photographs could be arranged into a single piece of film which, when run through a machine, simulated motion. However, the kinetoscope allowed only one member of the paying public to view the moving image at any one time. By contrast, the popular theatre, for example, provided orchestrated displays of visual spectacles, such as violent thunderstorms, which could be viewed by large audiences. The significant date could therefore be said to be 28 December 1895, when the Lumière brothers first showed a film to a paying audience in a Parisian basement café. By the middle of the following year, the first paying audience attended a screening in a New York vaudeville theatre, which used the Lumières’ cinématographe.

Films were originally shown as just one among a number of performances and attractions offered by the music hall or fairground, such as dramatic episodes, comedy acts, music, songs and other types of variety entertainment. They were not at first offered as separate types of mass entertainment, such as the staged play in the bourgeois theatre. Nonetheless, cinema expanded very rapidly as a form of mass entertainment. The appeal of these film sequences to larger and larger audiences made music hall proprietors recognise their popularity. It was at the point of exhibition that the possibilities of cinema as mass entertainment first began to be realised. It was also here that commercial profits were first gained on a scale that allowed capital to be accumulated and the industry to expand. This expansion spread outwards from exhibition until it eventually included production and distribution. The first films were part of the music hall or vaudeville package, and often spectacular in the images they projected to the public. Their emphasis on visual spectacle also built upon prior developments in visual culture. The first films showed such things as trains arriving in stations or waves breaking on a shoreline. However, these spectacles began to be governed by narratives, as the screening of films gradually moved from the music hall to theatres specially designed to show films.

The emergence of the linear narrative involves the sequential movement of characters and actions in time and space. This has been linked to technological developments such as editing. Editing allows a film to show, in sequence, different actions that occur at the same time in different locations, or different characters in different situations one after the other. E.S. Porter’s ten-minute film The Great Train Robbery is commonly regarded as one of the first films to use editing to tell a story (Burch 1978). It recounts, unsurprisingly, a train robbery and the pursuit and successful capture of the robbers by the sheriff’s posse. The use of editing enables the film to cut between the robbery and the sheriff being alerted to the crime in progress, and between the robbers and the posse in the chase sequence. The story could have been told without editing, and editing need not be used for narrative purposes. Editing was therefore shaped by the demands of the linear narrative, helping stories to be told in this way and providing an opportunity for them to be more varied and complex. These links between narrative and technological developments thus played their part in developing cinema as a type of popular mass culture.

We should not lose sight of the determinant role of production, however. The early cinema witnessed an increase in the production of ‘fictional narratives’, but this was not the direct result of increasing public demand. Film exhibitors tried to attract audiences by promoting films according to different categories. These were variety (including comedy), ‘trick’ films, ‘scenics’ (which included exotic locales as well as documentaries), ‘topicals’ (which included major news events, coronations, funerals, wars and even boxing matches) and fictional narratives.⁴ In the early years of the century, all of these proved attractive to audiences, and fiction was no more popular than scenics, or topicals. However, the production of films required a regular and steady flow of releases to stimulate demand and meet the need for new films. This ‘regular production’ was more likely to be provided by fictional narratives than by scenics or topicals. As Allen points out, fictional films could ‘be made at a low predictable cost per foot, produced in or near a centralized studio, and released on a regular schedule’ (quoted in Bordwell et al. 1985: 115, cf. 113–16, 160–1). He therefore argues that ‘commercial filmmakers weighted their output toward fictional narratives because of their suitability to mass production’, this ‘shift’ taking ‘hold’ by 1907–8 (ibid.: 115).

Soon, larger numbers of films, with definite story lines, began to be produced at relatively low costs. Companies such as Edison, Biograph and Vitagraph made films, but at first there was more money to be made from the lease or sale of the projectors and cameras for which they held the patents. Films were thus made to enable this equipment to be sold. The patents hel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Popular cinema: the Hollywood system
• 2 Popular cinema: Hollywood narrative and film genres
• 3 The gangster film
• 4 The horror film
• 5 Film noir
• 6 Popular television: citizenship, consumerism and television in the UK
• 7 The television audience
• 8 Popular television genres
• 9 Popular television and postmodernism
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index