Ugggg! As someone who has sat through years of film school close readings of films, it was refreshing for me to discover Hollywood Highbrow last semester. When I first came to cmu, I was shocked by the idea that anyone would discuss the industry or economic factors involving film and not simply the intertextuality of film. Now I must wonder why film studies hasn't moved more in this direction. I admire the sociological approach Baumann is taking as well as its correlation to Bourdieu's Fields of Cultural Production. This period is especially important for film studies where genre is heightened and art house makes money. Like Thomas, I too struggle with this need to analyze the outside factors without looking to aesthetics of the form itself. Then again, this has been done, so much so that when I wanted to jump into melodrama studies I could not fathom a topic that hadn't been analyzed in multiple books and articles already. I think it is fair to say that we can combine this sociological approach with other aesthetic approaches.
There was an intellectualizing of film during this time in a big way that cannot be easily ignored. When I come to a Godard film, I certainly come to it with a range of cultural capital, yet (like Thomas) I am moved by "feelings" and "emotions" from the aesthetic as well as its intellectual dilemmas. This is one element that Baumann could have looked for, not just by the form itself, but by the other industry and cultural cues that indicate the synthesis of intellectual discourse and visual notes. This is why I am so interested in film marketing during this era, especially in the growth of high-brow art house films. While the reviews cannot be ignored and certainly the growth of college curricula helped develop the field, marketing also moves back to the visual and the sensual. With the two ads above for L'Avventura we see the examples of this, the review driven intellectual discussion encouraging ads and the visual stimulating image of Monica Vitti. It demands you to look at her ! Theaters are also an interesting example of creating visual spaces for this new surge in intellectualism with ethnic, newsreel, and nickelodeons literally transforming their spaces to attract audiences. They created lobbies that looked and were meant to feel like museums and the Paris streets.
While I agree that we can't ignore the aesthetic of films (the feelings, the emotions, the inspiration and inter textual nature of film making and filmmakers) it is also increasingly impossible to ignore that film is an art driven by a money making industry. Art house and B-Movies are interesting to us now because they were a profitable market in the 1950s and 60s and because intellectual film scholars took up their cause in the 1970s film institutions and journals, not to mention it became profitable to exhibit them via TV, VHS, CABLE, DVD, and now CRITERION/KINO.
To think that we would have had even more films to see and discuss if it weren't for the economic implausibility of maintaining complete film archives before this era. Baumann gives us a way to quantify and understand why such films and movements succeeded beyond aesthetics and its all tied to money.
One more note! I agree that this is why sociologists aren't filmmakers, but they do make fantastic film scholars because they know how and where to look beyond the text. Some of the most well-regarded sociologist turned film scholars; Robert Sklar's "Movie-Made America" and Douglas Gomery's numerous books including "Shared Pleasures" are nearly canonized texts in film history.
Last note! Baumann needs some help with understanding film canons. I find it hard to believe that anyone within the field considers the Academy or AFI lists to be anyway a measure of the great film canon. Other than 1001 movies you must see before you die (Don't laugh, it's actually awesome, and a whole range of film scholars including MacCabe contribute to it) We have Paul Schrader's (screenwriter for Taxi Driver, director of the remake of Cat People... among others) Film Comment article which is modeled after Bloom's Western Civilization Canon.
Maybe we're not as autonomous as we thought!
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