Image and Influence

Studies in the Sociology of Film

Andrew Tudor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317928300
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This text outlines what sociologists need to know of the nature of communication and of mass culture, while also looking in some empirical detail at the workings of the Hollywood community and the psychology of the star system. It explores trends such as attempts to adapt semiology and psycholinguistics to our understanding of film 'language', using them to develop a paradigm for film analysis. The book goes on to offer a guide to comprehension of the relation between cinema and society through detailed analysis of the relation between the German silent cinema and its social context and extensive discussion of popular genres like the western, gangster movie and horror movie. Seeing movies in terms of meaning, as reservoirs of culture which audiences may use for a variety purposes, this book uses a combination of sociological perspective and critical method to present a unique intriguing perspective.

Chapter 1

Forthcoming Attractions!

 

 

In 1922 Lenin made his now famous statement to the effect that ‘… the cinema is the most important of all the arts’.¹It might even have been an understatement. Certainly it was born of the recognition that here was one of the most socially significant innovations of the twentieth century. While much ‘educated’ comment saw the movies as of little real significance (except, perhaps, as a bad example to lower-class delinquents), the Soviet leader recognised the new medium's potential for creating change – and create change it did. Try to imagine a world without the movies or their inheritance. Though their days of universal popularity are gone, their influence still waxes. They have left us a characteristic imagery now thoroughly embedded in our cultures. The gangsters, the cowboys, the clean-limbed heroes, the vamps, and all the many characters, come to us in our childhood and remain with us for life. The genres, the techniques, the very conventions of the fiction film have undergone only minor changes in the modern shift to television. Until the forties the worlds which the cinema created reigned supreme in western popular cultures. They gave people a common reality however different the actual locations of their everyday lives. We have not shaken off that inheritance, nor are we likely to do so in the foreseeable future.

There is no immediate need to document the ways in which the cinema has entered our lives. A moment's reflection by any but a recluse is sufficient. With the coming of film, for the first time there was a widespread common articulation of the beliefs, aspirations, antagonisms, and doubts of the huge populations of modern societies. For the first time men could share the same sentiments, simultaneously, and in every place that could run to a picture show. Going to the movies rapidly became the leisure activity, there to laugh helplessly at Charlie Chaplin eating his boots in The Gold Rush or Buster Keaton shuffling soggy cards in The Navigator; to weep with the mourning populace of Odessa in Battleship Potemkin; to experience Mae Marsh's hand-wringing anxiety in the modern story of Intolerance; or to share some part of the pioneering spirit of The Covered Wagon or The Iron Horse. It mattered little, then as now, that the movies were ‘unreal’, that they were not obviously ‘morally uplifting’, that few recognised them as Art. They thrived. They moved, literally and emotionally, and soon they would also speak. It is to their credit that they survived the stuffy demands for moral uplift and the snobbish cries for Art. The cinema came just as near to tumbling lemminglike over the precipices of aesthetic liberation as it did to burial in the grave of commerical pap. The point is not unimportant. Take as an example the films of John Ford, a clear talent whose career spans almost the whole of film history. He demonstrates the division. In the thirties and forties he was praised for giving us ‘moral uplift’ and Art in films which succeeded only in looking like maudlin tales exquisitely dressed as Serious Things: The Informer, The Long Voyage Home, and The Fugitive immediately come to mind. Yet that last vulgarisation of Graham Greene's novel came just one year after the delicate perceptions of My Darling Clementine. It seems impossible to reconcile Ford's great achievements – She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Searchers, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance – with these almost embarrassing essays in pictorialism.

In a way they are irreconcilable. There is something about Ford's vision of the world, his whole aesthetic sensibility, which causes him to excel in the fixed universe of the western, and fall flat on his face elsewhere. This is a sad failing of a major talent, and no doubt partly a result of the artistic values which have gained currency in the cinema at various times. But for us it should demonstrate that the art of film lies in making movies which directly communicate the dynamism of their world without being sidetracked into demonstrating their capacities as Art. It is this ability to reach people directly, without mediation by the over-intellectualising tendencies of much modern art, which so distinguished the cinema from its predecessors, but it had also an unfortunate influence on the ways in which students sought to understand the workings of film. Since the movies were rarely Art, then they could hardly be a ‘good thing’. Or so it went. From such a simple prejudice flowed an endless sequence of misunderstandings. In one area, the ‘language’ of film, analysis declined into discussion of the methods of the more acceptably artistic movies. It is only in recent years that the ‘everyday’ cinema has begun to receive the serious attention that it deserves.² More important in this context, the sociological study of film retained a certain negative emphasis. The major empirical researches – the Payne Fund studies of 1929 through to 1933 – were motivated by the feeling that everday cinema was having dire moral effects on all and sundry.³ They were forever recommending that children should be taught a ‘serious and distanced’ attitude to the movies, and their value as sociological analyses is limited by the imbalances in this brief.

So, allowing that the all too familiar negativism and condescension are misplaced, what would a sociological account of film look like? What does it mean to have sociological knowledge about the movies ? Off and on various people have suggested provisional schematics for a sociology of film.⁴ I have no such intention here, though this book as a whole might partly contribute to such a process. Ultimately, sociological knowledge of film would surely mean a body of ‘true’ statements about the role of the institution in society, its effects, the organisational context within which it operates, the nature, attitudes, and preferences of its audience, and the interrelations between these and endless other factors. In short, an exhaustive, intersubjectively verified, consistent, and generally applicable account of the many social worlds of the cinema. It goes without saying that such an account would be impossible as of now, next year, or next century. Sociology cannot scale such a peak in any area of discourse let alone on a topic which has been almost systematically neglected. We do not have even the first precondition of such an achievement : a rigorous accumulation of knowledge about film. What we do have is discrete and disorganised, filled with gaps, guesses, and dubious chunks of received wisdom.

No doubt this sounds like the familiar sociologist's complaint: ‘we are only just beginning; please don't expect too much’. It is an understandable appeal in a subject which spends a good deal of its time in attempting disciplined formulation of things which many consider to be obvious, but it does have two justifications. One is that the things which people take to be the case quite often are not. For instance, the mass media clearly do not have the dramatic, immediate, and direct effects suggested by successive waves of ‘media panic’. Sociology can thus try to demystify. The second justification is a claim of a different sort. Sociology is necessarily in the business of trying to construct disciplined formulations. If it sometimes seems a long way round, then that is because it is. The sociologist takes common knowledge, the random information that comes the way of any perceptive member of a society, deliberately gathered information, this, that, and the other, and tries to shape this unwieldy mess into some sort of order. He starts by constructing a simplified picture, something easily handled, as a provisional guide; this is his first stage in ‘making sense’ of a subject. Then he takes the picture back to the information, perhaps directing his attention to filling in the gaps. Revision follows. And so it goes on, as more is incorporated into the picture and less is left outside. When most of the gaps have been filled he might have something approaching an acceptable theory.

The sociology of film has no such beast. We have some bits and pieces of theories, certainly, and they help to make sense out of some bits and pieces of information. Such minor applications are scattered through this book. But basically we are still at the stage of early systematisation, of trying to make primitive sociological sense out of a mixed body of data. This task is not helped by the fact that sociologyis so defensive of its specialisms, for it is above all at this stage that the sociologist needs all the help he can get. In dealing with the cinema (and other media) this introversion has had one fatal consequence. Where sociology could and should benefit from the insights and interests of film criticism, it has instead tried to present itself as distinct from, and even superior to, such ‘subjective’ endeavours. This has often manifested itself as an elaborate ‘methodologism’ whereby sociological methods, such as content analysis, are claimed to supersede the random perceptions of the inferior critic. This is rubbish, and pernicious rubbish at that. Although the insecurity that it reflects is intelligible it is not to be justified, and I trust that this book is imbued with my belief that a sociological study as primitive as this must take what it can get, where it can get it, and how it can get it. It is in his subsequent treatment of these materials that the sociologist begins to part ways with his critical colleagues; though not mutually exclusive, their interests are finally slightly different.

So to the book itself. There is a good deal here which derives from the practice of film criticism, especially in the later chapters where the links between meaning and socio-cultural context are discussed. To make these analyses slightly more methodical I have given their basis a separate consideration in Chapter 5; this discussion of film language is perhaps the most complex and abstract section of the book, but it is an essential prelude to the empirical discussions that follow it. In effect it divides the whole account in two, and in several senses. The first part (Chapters 2–4) is broadly microscopic in its focus, concerned primarily with the process of communication, and often takes off from criticism of established sociological studies. It is in this area that we find most research, and so these chapters are a mixture of critical commentary and further development. Chapter 2 offers a general organising outline – a ‘conceptual scheme’ – while Chapters 3 and 4 flesh this skeleton out with some empirical detail. These are the traditional areas of mass media research. Chapter 5, the dividing chapter, alters the emphasis. Though its discussion of ‘film language’ growsout of my analysis of the communication process, its main implications lie elsewhere. It leads to three chapters concerned with cinema as a pattern of culture within society: one conceptual, two empirical. So, where the early chapters are microscopic the latter are macroscopic, and where the former looked at communication the latter look at culture. And since these macroscopic interests are historically neglected in media research there is less critical commentary and more exploratory discussion. The net result is a considerable stylistic and substantive difference between the two parts of the book. This seems an inevitable compromise in trying to write a general book on a subject so selectively and differentially studied. It also reflects one of my main beliefs: in studying the media we must turn increasingly to macroscopic issues of the relation between the media and society.

The materials I invoke are drawn from a wide variety of sources. Where it has seemed helpful I have considered particular cases at some length, sometimes for their value as examples of my more abstract analyses, sometimes as a part of a more speculative research process. Thus, I have illustrated my discussion of ‘movie communicators’ by analysing the Hollywood system in its heyday. By contrast, I have selected the western, the gangster movie, and the horror movie as case studies from which to develop a theory of the popular genres. Similarly with so-called ‘German expressionism’ in my discussion of film movements. My intention throughout has been to organise the materials as much as they will permit, whether one case or a range of examples. Obviously, then, this book is not a sociology of film. It is a partial account, an interpretation of the various social worlds in which the movies are to be found. It is necessarily incomplete, sometimes confused, and always provisional, and it is far from unified: do not expect a general theory of film here. It reflects my belief that the cinema is a vital art as well as being an omnipresent part of our cultural scene. It rests on my feeling that we must look to the methods of criticism if we are to understand the communication of meaning. But above all it shares Lenin's belief in the enormous social importance of this characteristic twentieth-century institution. If for no other reason than this we have no choice but to try to understand such a vital social process.

 

 

References

¹ This is the usual form in which the phrase is quoted, though the source appears to be: ‘… so you must well remember that, of all the arts, for us the cinema is most important’, a comment made to Lunacharsky in February 1922. (J. Leyda, p. 161 – see Selected Bibliography for further details.) In a Soviet Union about to face the challenge of NEP Lenin well recognised the problems of bringing about cultural change to match the political revolution.

² Much of this renewed attention was stimulated by the work of Cahiers du Cinéma and, rather later, Movie. For a stimulating discussion in book form see V. F. Perkins (Selected Bibliography) ; Perkins was closely associated with Movie. For a discussion of the situation which gave rise to some of the emphases of film criticism see A. Tudor, Theories of Film (Selected Bibliography).

³ The studies focused basically on the influence of the movies on young people, and used the methods of interview, survey, experiment and content analysis. They will figure in the discussion of later chapters, especially Chapter 4.

⁴ See, for example: E. Morin, ‘Preliminaires à une Sociologie du Cinéma’; W. Dadek (see Bibliography) ; G. Huaco, ‘Toward a Sociology of Film Art’ and his The Sociology of Film Art; T. Lovell, ‘An Approach to the Sociology of Film’, and her article ‘Sociology and the Cinema’. (See Selected Bibliography.)

Chapter 2

Patterns of Communication

Hugh Dalziel Duncan's Communication and Social Order ends on a note of rhetorical appeal.

‘We must return the study of man in society to a study of communication, for how we communicate determines how we...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• 1 Forthcoming Attractions
• 2 Patterns of Communication
• 3 Movie Communicators
• 4 Movie Audiences
• 5 Movie Languages
• 6 Patterns of Culture
• 7 Cinema and Society: Film Movements
• 8 Cinema and Society: Popular Genres
• 9 Patterns of Change
• Selected Bibliography
• Index