Why Sociologists don't make films.... and why I have to sound like a douche when talking about it

First, I feel the need to validate myself as a former student of film. Film has an important place in my academic life. And, though my undergraduate institution did not offer a film major, I overloaded my course work every semester to fit as many film courses as possible on top of my English courses, eventually having enough film course credits as would satisfy a double major. There are few areas of study I understand as well or better than film, so when I criticize "Hollywood Highbrow", I do it not out of a hatred of the text, but of a deep love of film.

The introduction is an interesting interpretation of the legitimizing path film studies/criticism has taken, if not without a few glaring errors. I understand the purpose of the book is not to act as a survey for introductory film courses, but I have a difficult time understanding how the text could be taught in any film course precisely because its lack of aesthetic analysis of the historically and sociologically changing interpretations of the VISUAL art of film, or close readings of seminal texts as examples and further proof of the arguments presented.

Andrew Sarris, maybe the most influential American film critic of the 1960s and 1970s called for a re-evaluation of American films. Contrary to what Baumann might have you believe about 'auteur theory' being imported from Europe and more specifically, France, it was not until Sarris' article "Notes on the Auteur Theory"(1962) and his subsequent book, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968 published in 1968, that the theory took hold in the states on a wider scale. Sarris called for films to be viewed using the three premises of auteur theory.... technique, personal style, and interior meaning. This was how a great deal of academic film criticism functioned up until the early 1980's. Baumann mentions Sarris only once, in his page on the shift from studio to director driven cinema. I was more than a little shocked to see him all but absent everywhere else in the text.

When Francois Truffaut wrote extensively on the theory in the mid 1950's it was a criticism of French post-war film, and not specifically targeted at Hollywood. To take it back even further, the supposed era in which Baumann suggests spawns the split of European and American taste in film and their later generations (namely the period between the wars) is precisely the time when the art and entertainment of film was perhaps at its most unified state. It was a time when both F.W. Murnau and Erich Von Stroheim (Among many other directors) immigrated to the U.S. and posted enormous box-office numbers with films that are highly regarded as some of the best films in History. ("Sunrise", and "Greed")

I could go on and on...

The point being, the book has some interesting graphs relating audience numbers, the shift in studio ownership of theaters, and the rising numbers of educated middle-class Americans... but what doesn't it have? A solid understanding of how film operates outside of numbers / or even how film criticism has and does function.

In analyzing part of Baumann's link between American Art film and European Art film and that European Art films altered the American perspective of the legitimacy of its own cinema... then I say... NO SHIT!?! Really? You mean the 400 Blows inspired a re-articulation of the coming of age story in American Film? You mean Italian Neo-Realism in the early 1950s made way for the socially conscious films of the late 1960's in America? You mean Claude Chabrol laid the blueprint in the late 60s and early 70s for what would in the 1980s be the American erotic thriller? You mean, profitable formulas are adopted and adapted to specific cultures in order to produce profit? Narrative and Visual forms are largely responsible for shifting audience tastes and aesthetics do play a significant role in the development of the industry AND the artform.

Basically, Baumann wants to have his cake and eat it too. He talks to directors about the creation of art, and then says that art only becomes so through the act of criticism by 'cultural experts', and only accepted by the public as art when it is processed through the filtering eye of the critic. The 'cultural experts' interpretation or reading is either accepted of rejected by the public.

For Baumann aesthetics are arbitrary. And he explains his perspective as “The book presents a sociological perspective, arguing that the coalescence of a novel perspective among a large group of people is a social process that lends itself more readily to sociological analysis than aesthetic analysis.”

I suppose that is why sociologists don't make films. They can't seem to figure out if the audience is making the art, or if the art is just good enough to create an audience.

Baumann jumps from topic to topic, citing sources and raising issues without fleshing them out or accurately connecting them to many specific, iconic films that support the claimed shifts in audience, profitability, and critical perspective.