Towards a Sociology of the Cinema (ILS 92)

Ian Charles Jarvie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780415176019
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317854142
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1998. This is Volume IX, of nine in the Sociology of Culture series and looks at the a comparative essay on the structure and functioning of a major entertainment industry: the cinema.

Part One

THE SOCIOLOGY OF AN INDUSTRY: WHO MAKES FILMS, HOW AND WHY?

I wish to deal with the industry first and with its audience second; films must be made before they can be seen. True, there must be demand before there can be supply; however, it is sufficient to explain supply by saying demand is anticipated; this is known as risk. In brief the answer to ‘who makes films, how and why?’ is this. First, who: films are made principally by a specialized industry which recruits widely. Second, how: the industry operates like any other, bringing together land, labour and capital. Further detail involves exploring the rather interesting history and present social structure of that industry. Third, why: simple enough; the industry produces films in order to make profit, and/or to make propaganda; the individuals who man the industry do so either to make money, and/or quality films, not to mention some other desires that cinema gratifies, such as fame or sex.

I

The Relevance of the Sociology of the Industry to the Sociology of the Medium-at-Large

1 Individual versus collective arts

A film is a product to be produced, consumed, reacted to and evaluated. Mostly we shall be concerned with those produced by an industry. Films are also the objects of action. People wish to see them, for whatever reason. Mostly we shall be concerned with how they accomplish this desire in the commercial structure the industry provides. What difference does it make to a study of this kind that films are produced by an industry and not by a man with a chisel; that it takes a sub-society of the society to make them? It makes both more and less difference than at first sight.

Unlike some of the longer established arts, e.g., poetry and music, and more like the theatre, films are rarely the product of one man’s unaided creative effort. In the last five years it has become possible for one man, even one with limited resources, to make a film that is up to professional standards. To do so, to make a film entirely on one’s own, requires at least the abilities to operate a film camera, develop the film, splice film together, and record sound on to it. Few professional film makers do or did possess any or all of these abilities. In the period since the pioneer days when almost everybody in films could handle several jobs, a high degree of division of labour has been introduced, and directors, for example, have rarely mastered more than one other function of the film-making process.¹ Part of the amateurishness of amateur films stems from the sheer difficulty of mastering these different processes in all their current complexity. What does all this matter? Is there an inherent difference between arts which can only be produced collectively, and those, like writing or painting, which can be produced by an unaided individual? Does such an alleged difference tell us that a drama differs from a novel in the same way that a building differs from a statue? To answer this question it might be helpful to look at architecture: film, like architecture, is a collective art. To complete the final product an architect must use the services of a good many highly specialized concerns. And although architectural education is very thorough in giving an architect an understanding of all these different specialities, it is not necessary for him actually to be able to mix and pour concrete, weld steel, glaze glass, cut wood or master other processes which he decrees must go into the realization of his conceptions.

That such differences as these between collective and individual arts cannot be inherent is shown by the exceptions to this on both sides. Against the architect one can put a man who designs and builds his own log cabin; against a professional in Hollywood, one can put a film maker who does everything himself.² Against the writer or artist, one can put cases where novels and poems were co-authored, paintings and sculptures worked on by several persons.

There are, then, no inherently collective or individual arts. There are, however, important differences of organizational complexity in the production processes of different arts. Even the organizational complexity of films and architecture differ in that the latter is a profession with legally enforced status; the former has only a trade union closed shop, with no legal and little professional status given its members. The building industry is as complex and subdivided as the film-making industry – not to mention the book publishing industry and the music-publishing and recording industry. But a comparison of degrees of complexity is of no interest in itself. What is interesting is the question of who if anyone is the key creative person in a collective art. There is little doubt about the answer, indeed there are no competing claims, in the fields of making buildings and making books.³ The situation is by no means as clear in the making of records, much less of films. Since it is possible for one man to make a film, I would contend that there is nothing inherent in the film medium which complicates the assignment of responsibility. Instead, I maintain – to begin with at least – that the problem arises purely because of the way the complex organization of film-making is structured. Films can be made or marred in such a large number of ways, and decisions made at such a number of levels in the organization, that there is a genuine question as to whether there is sufficient centralization of decision-making to attribute the finished product to any one individual.

An informed film critic is well aware of this. Yet being convinced that films are an art, and that art demands an artist, he seeks to identify a centre or essence of the film and attribute responsibility to that one person. This is not hard to do, since it is the critic who decides what the essence is. In the early fifties the journal Sight and Sound printed two articles by film makers which, incredibly, disputed this issue. Howard Koch, a writer, made the case for the script being the essence of the film; Thorold Dickinson, a writer-director, argued that the director, even when he realizes someone else’s script, gives the film its essence.⁴ A couple of years later in the same journal an unknown young critic, Tony Richardson,⁵ went even further. He distinguished directors who were genuine creative artists and the essence of whose films had some personal vision, from brilliant technicians who had no central vision, but were adept at realizing scripts written by others. It is not clear whether Richardson believed that only creative film makers made films with essences, or whether it was simply that their essences were better or truer.⁶

When a question is turned into one of defining an essence,⁷ all answers are of necessity either arbitrary or verbal or both. Yet the underlying problem – the attribution of responsibility for the work – is a genuine one. Film makers sometimes find themselves complimented for a touch in a film that was someone else’s idea. For example, a critic once complimented John Ford on the perfection of his film They Were Expendable. It transpired that the film had been edited after Ford had gone on to other things: the result was over two hours long; Ford insisted he shot it to be 1

hours and he ought to know.⁸ Acid things were said by many about Marlon Brando’s performance in, and general behaviour during the making of, Mutiny on the Bounty, yet the result was superbly original. Since film is a collective art it is a truism that all those involved are collectively responsible. But there is a limit to this, as the examples show: what one remembers about Expendable is the dignified pace – for which Ford was at most partly responsible;⁹ what one remembers about Bounty is Brando’s sparkling performance – for which no-one else – not the director or the other actors – can take the slightest credit. With the general run of films the question of overall responsibility rarely arises. Nice touches which aid the total effect may or may not have been contributed by photographers, editors, designers, actors. Where the question of responsibility becomes interesting is in the case of good films, and especially those chains of good films which display something we call a ‘personal style’.

In general in these cases, we find it convenient to assume what fits most of the evidence, that the director is the key man, i.e., the person ultimately responsible for what appears on our screens. (It needs to be said that the person who ‘produces’ a play on the stage is the equivalent of a film director. A film producer, as will be made clear below, is equivalent to a theatrical impresario. Confusion is further aided by a recent tendency of producers of plays to call themselves, aping film terminology, ‘directors’.) Our assumption is, though, one of convenience, because we know perfectly well that even a director with a personal style can have a film he has made spoiled by bad photography, bad editing, bad casting, bad performances, bad sound, bad production design, etc. Each of these is usually the province of a different individual, or even department, whose work is sometimes executed after the director has performed his allotted tasks. Therefore, he is not always responsible. It is still advisable to start with the assumption that the director is responsible, and only where the evidence seems to conflict with that assumption shall we offer different theories, such as that the director was aided or abetted by this or that collaborator or specialist despite himself (if he was helped intentionally then he takes the responsibility as chooser). Remember we are discussing here those special individuals in whose work we perceive a style. The assumption of directorial supremacy is not only false but absurd where routine big studio production is concerned, since here the director may have had only a minimal say in the casting and staffing of the production team. We cannot hold those responsible who have had no control. It is nevertheless remarkable how personal was much of the work done in the heyday of the Hollywood machine: Val Lewton horror films, MGM musicals, the films of Cukor, Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock, Lang, Lubitsch, Mamoulian, McCarey, Milestone, Siodmak, Stevens, Sturges, Vidor, Von Sternberg, Wyler, to mention only a few of those securely established in Hollywood before the war.

What about eminent directors who have full control? They, we agree, must take full responsibility. By full control we mean selecting the personnel and okaying the final product – usually by leaving their names on it. Alfred Hitchcock might say¹⁰ that Technicolor assured him that a Baltimore street set (in Marnie) would look realistic in the final print, and he believed them, but the result was very poor in fact. This does not relieve him of the responsibility for what he called a poor shot (nor did he disclaim it). He appointed Technicolor, he accepted their reassurance, and he decided to pass the final print with the poor shot in it, for whatever reasons. So although it seems responsibility lies squarely on the shoulders of eminent directors, we certainly cannot assume this of all, especially those who are cogs in studio machines.

What does it matter who is responsible? Isn’t the main question: ‘is film x good or bad?’ Indeed, this is the main question. But, do we need to know who is responsible for the film as a whole in order to answer the question? The answer to this would seem to be ‘no’. There is a standard view that the way to evaluate a film or any work of art is to see it a few times, think about it, try out various interpretations, argue about it and endeavour to make up one’s mind. Nowhere here does the question of personal artistic responsibility arise. Whether the film was made by a robot or by Alfred Hitchcock is quite irrelevant. I shall try to explain why this standard view is utterly mistaken.¹¹

2 Internal interpretation versus external interpretation

There are other questions, not so central, but certainly not peripheral even at a first glance, such as why is film x so similar to film y in so many respects and yet so superior to it? The two films may have been produced by the same company, on the same sets, with roughly the same actors playing roughly the same roles, in almost the same story. Such a comparison may look like a typical philosopher’s thought-experiment: beautiful to contemplate but nothing to do with reality. Then, consider the following pairs of films:

SUPERIOR	INFERIOR
Frankenstein	House of Frankenstein
Dr No	Goldfinger
A Night at the Opera	Go West
Adventures of Robin Hood (Errol Flynn)	Captain Blood Sirocco
Casablanca	Return to Peyton Place
Peyton Place

And in case you are theorizing that the second film is worse because it is a follow up:

Sylvia	The Carpetbaggers
any good Randolph Scott	any bad Randolph Scott
western	western

Explaining evaluations like these is not only an academic exercise in comparative evaluation, but also a means of improving the general level of film – for instance, by trying to learn from those films that do it better. This must involve the question of who is responsible for the good things in a good film, how was it done, and is it something we can learn? Is it simply that a good film comes from a good man, or does a good film come from placing responsibility in good hands?

There are purists who contend that evaluations in art should only be allowed on the basis of evidence internal to the work itself. We can now ask whether the problem of responsibility for the good or bad in a film can be settled with reference to external evidence. It might be clear to the sensitive viewer that the ending of Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons is slightly out of key with the rest of the film. Several viewings later, one has only progressed to knowing that something went wrong. Did Welles foul up, or was his work tampered with? It is important to decide a question like this both for the critical assessment of Welles’ judgment, and for the question of how films can be improved. Only external evidence can decide these questions for us, and thus it has a place.

Yet once it is admitted that the question of responsibility is interesting and relevant, it is difficult to defend the ‘internal evidence’ purists. After all, even if films were produced by robots, we would be interested in getting to know which robot was producing good films, which bad, if only to decide which to see. Then commonsense presses in on us: the film x is good to a certain extent because it has the signature of Alfred Hitchcock on every sequence. This commonsense remark can only be unpacked by reference to Hitchcock’s style and mannerisms, which involves comparison with other films he is known to have made. Pedagogically, of course, this sort of assignment of responsibility is vital. Only then can one show how a director has learned and matured as his career in films has progressed. This object lesson may or may not help others to do the same. Certainly, some of the pleasure art gives us is that of recognition. Simply enjoying Hitchcock’s confident exposition can be like marvelling at Bach’s way with a fugue.

Later, in chapter XVI, I shall press for the inclusion of external evidence in the evaluation of films on the more abstract aesthetic ground that no work of art can be interpreted, still less understood, without some background information and that once this is agreed the critical critic must admit: ‘the more information the better’.¹² The rational pursuit for the writer on films, I shall argue, and this goes for the informed filmgoer too, is to try to find out, from internal and external evidence, what happened during the making of a film, and to distribute praise and blame as best he can in accordance with this knowledge, or to make critical guesses where he has none. Internal evidence can be used to help assign responsibilities also, but the precision with which it can be used varies greatly. The time comes when its interpretation becomes overly subtle and to insist on it exclusively is purist; that is, the belief that a work of art is an...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• A Note to the Reader
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction The Relevance of Cinema and of Sociology in General to the Sociology of the Medium-at-Large
• Part One The Sociology of an Industry: Who Makes Films, How and Why?
• Part Two The Sociology of an Audience: Who Sees Films and Why?
• Part Three the Sociology of an Experience: Who Sees Films and Why?
• Part Four the Sociology of Evaluation: How do We Learn about, and Appraise, Films?
• Appendix Film and the Communication of Values
• Bibliography
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Names
• Index of Films