purification and venues

While reading Baumann I realized how little I know of film history. It was helpful that he organized his sociology of the film industry along the same lines as Bourdieu or Latour (mentioning actors and networks). By placing the individual films or art-objects on the same plane as the institutions, discourses, venues, and sites of consumption which make them possible, he was able to dispel an "idealist" version of film history in which supposedly great films rise to the top of their own accord.

Against this notion of the purification of the field, Baumann recounts the transition of venues in chapter three and the economic factors that provoked this change. The effect of suburbia on cinema-going gave rise to the drive-in movie theater. Here we have something crassly non-artistic (the deployment of mass-produced dormitories in the landscape) seriously shapes the manner and reason for consuming movies. Its a shift towards the private experience, the couple or the family. "Overall," Baumann writes, "this change in the mode of exhibition did not affect the composition of the audience; it merely reflected changing residential patterns" (90).

The development of the art house allowed theaters to cater to specific interests of a given niche community, whether that be the highbrow avant-garde or foreign films for populations of recent immigrants. When I lived in North Carolina there was an independent (i guess "art house") theater that switched formats to show films from India. I remember thinking it appeared as if they were showing these films (which were widely consumed by the large population of Indian immigrants in the Research Triangle Park region) to subsidize their more "arty" (and less attended) movies.

By placing the economic and institutional factors on the same footing as the development of film as an academic or intellectual discourse, as well as the directors themselves increasingly adopting the stance of artists, Baumann brings the notion of a purified field of high film back into its mucky relations. Rather than tarnishing some idealized image, as a reader, I found myself more appreciative of the process.