Ian Charles Jarvie - Towards a Sociology of the Cinema

The International Library of Sociology

TOWARDS A SOCIOLOGY OF THE CINEMA

The International Library of Sociology

THE SOCIOLOGY OF CULTURE
In 9 Volumes

TOWARDS A SOCIOLOGY OF THE CINEMA

A Comparative Essay on the Structure and Functioning of a Major Entertainment Industry

by

I. C. JARVIE

First published 1970 by Routledge

Published 2013 by Routledge

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1970 I. C. Jarvie

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ISBN 13: 978-0-415-17601-9 (hbk)

Contents

Note to the Reader

The reader coming cold to the subject may find it helpful to read the Appendix, Film and the Communication of Values, first. This Appendix is a talk delivered at the Centre for Culture and Technology, University of Toronto, while the book was being written. I introduces and applies some of the ideas in the book in a general manner, and so may help the general reader to get used to some of the idiosyncrasies of the literature to which this volume is a modest contribution. But, that Appendix revolves around a special topic namely, the communication of values, and I therefore felt that in would be inappropriate to place it at the beginning of the book as and Introduction proper.

Preface

First, a limit to aims: this is an essay towards, no more, a sociology of the cinema. Merely compiling a near-complete bibliography is far beyond my present resources. As for planning and directing empirical research into the subject, that is a dream which may one day come true. What I attempt here, in lieu of such new empirical research, is to sift and put together some of the innumerable snippets of information that are to be found scattered throughout the very large literature on the cinema. No satisfactory overall framework has yet been proposed which will incorporate all this information. My task shall be to construct a tentative sociological framework within which these snippets can be arranged. The primary purpose of such a framework is to explain or make sense of the facts (see my (1964)). But it can do other jobs as well. It will pose questions and indicate answers which will serve to organize the confused discussion of the topics; the discussion may thereby be enabled to progress, i.e., to go beyond my questions and answers. Another job the framework will do is to reveal where there are gaps in the scattered information. Of course, I shall be exposing far more gaps than I can possibly close. My reason for doing this is that there is so much unsurveyed ground that closing the gaps is not urgent. If my framework manages to support even that much a survey however inadequately, I shall be satisfied.

Second, a limit to scope. This work tries to be about the sociology of the cinema. The trouble with most previous works which pretended to be about the sociology of the cinema, was that they were not about the sociology of the cinema; the authors have hardly seemed aware of the more obvious sociological questions which the cinema gives rise to. Judging by the published literature, the sociology of the cinema has come to mean (not the sociology, but) the psychology (not of the cinema, but) of the audiences in the cinema, their responses, etc. Thus, a sample of the topics discussed most frequently in the literature: the frequency of cinemagoing and its relation to intelligence; the degree of identification of the audience with screen stars and characters; the degree of influence of films on childrens mores; and so on. Mayers two books British Cinemas and their Audiences and Sociology of Film are paradigms of this kind of literature.

If one is interested in such economic and sociological topics as the financial, industrial and social structure of the film industry, its basis of recruitment, the role the institution of cinemagoing plays in the social structure of modern Western societies, the typical kinds of society and social situation that are portrayed on the screen, the problem of why certain films have appeal and others do not, one will find very little of interest in the works of Mayer. Indeed one will find precious little even in the otherwise fascinating anthologies of Rosenberg and White (1957), McCann (1964), Robinson (1967), Deer and Deer (1967) and White and Averson (1968). There is virtually no institutional analysis in these works. Such content analyses as exist, as those in Jones (1942), Wolfenstein and Leites (1950, 1955), and Mead (1959), are fragmentary and tantalizing. When psychologists and social psychologists like Kracauer (1947) and Huaco (1965) are turned loose they either make unacceptable sociological assumptions,1 or treat films as though they existed in a sociological vacuum.2

The present work views the cinema as a social phenomenon one social institution among many. In trying to fit it into a framework I have divided the problems into four main areas, covering the making, viewing, experiencing and evaluating of films.