Baumann

A few notes on format … I (think) I liked that Baumann italicized key ideas (especially since I skimmed the book). It seems a little corny, but why not use this kind of visual technique in order to get your main points, arguments across? I don’t know how I feel about all the delineations though.

I also think the book feels a bit repetitive after a while … Baumann spends a lot of time reiterating his points, which is certainly helpful, but doesn’t seem to match the audience (mostly intellectuals, professors, students – I would think).

I liked the notion of “opportunity spaces”; it seems like a potentially useful concept for a range of LCS projects. It nicely combines social and economic considerations into a neat package of sorts. It captures all the conditions that create opportunities without trying to relate each condition to the others. The only condition – I would argue – for having an “opportunity space” is intent, because for me “opportunity” implies an underlying agency, not a happenstance. In Baumann’s case, filmmakers saw a chance to capitalized, because television had replaced film as the vulgar/popular medium.

Although I found Baumann’s arguments, generally, quite convincing, I (like a few other people in the class – it seems from the blog) would have liked to have seen some more closed commentary, inter-textual reading, regarding the films themselves. I think Cold War gave us a nice example of how the two approaches – looking at a cultural phenomenon in terms of social/economic context AND in terms of some close readings/viewings, etc – can be nicely blended, complementary. I just think literature (or film, in this case) and its context are totally entangled and privileging one over the other seems a bit incomplete or something.

Also as someone who knows not so much about film, I want more specifics. The lack of examples also makes me question the entire concept of the book … I am still not quite convinced that Hollywood and highbrow should ever be grouped together. I would like to hear more about distinctions between Hollywood films and avant-garde films.

Thoughts on Hollywood Highbrow

In the first hundred or so pages Baumann has impressively blended both history and sociology to investigate the historical changes occurring in the perception of Hollywood films as lowbrow entertainment to highbrow art form. To do this, Baumann insists on examining the artistic production and reception of film as a social process contingent upon a thorough contextual understanding of the economic, social, political, and technological changes from the beginning of film’s inception at the tail end of the 19^th century moving into the 1970’s at least at end of the third chapter.

I do have a few critical questions/observations though that might be taken up during class discussion.

In the second chapter “The Changing Opportunity Space” Baumann uses statistics to show how the advent of television had a negative impact on film going. He writes, “Despite the discrepancies found in the historical statistics, it is nonetheless clear that by the early 1950s televisions were to be found in all but the most privileged of homes, including most working-class homes” (39). It would be interesting to shift the focus, though this is not Baumann’s intention, to find out when the upper class started purchasing televisions, and what societal factors could have motivated the legitimation of television viewing in this group.

Continuing in Chapter 2, Baumann provides a contemporary example of how higher status groups associate certain popular musicians with tackiness and bad taste. He writes, “Examples of popular singers and musicians who tend not only to be avoided but derided by high status groups include Celine Dion and Kenny G. These musicians make easy-listening pop music, a “middle America” genre. The alignment of regional designation with bad taste is another interesting side-thread, that although isn’t really a part of Baumann’s project, is intriguing as a phenomenon that needs further investigation. Why bad taste needs a particular locale for those atop the cultural hierarchy, and how “middle America” came to be a suitable and acceptable place for those making the judgments, would be an interesting cultural/sociological/historical study.

In chapter 3, “The Change Within,” Baumann discusses how directors like John Ford, Howard Hawks, and George Cukor, preferred to be associated as technical workers, not as artists. One of the reasons why these directors chose not to identify as artists was because they did not yet have the institutional support to promote themselves in this fashion nor did the language of director as auteur have any representational currency yet. It’s interesting though that these directors seemed to responding to the “do you consider yourself an artist?” question from the media interviewing them. How was it then that the discourse of auteur theory was available and seemingly conversational among the media, but it was slower to gain traction with actual directors?

Matt

i paid $40 for this book.

the section that struck me most in baumann's book was the section on academia's role in the legitimation of film as art. (perhaps i've been spending too much time with jeff williams).

for me the argument in this passage felt very chicken or the egg by which i mean, i question if it was it academia that aided in film's legitimation or was it because film was being seen more and more as art that academia took notice? it's hard to say really. perhaps my problem is in the personification of academia. i found myself saying that people make up academia and it's important to remember it is the action of individuals that does the legitimation. but the thought stopped there.

so i did what i always do when i'm struggling with a text: roll my eyes and close it. staring down at the dust jacket i only found mona lisa's impertinent smirk mocking me. i sneered and said, "and i paid forty dollars for this book?!"

then a gear shifted. why did i pay so much for this book?

first of all it's hard cover. not many academic books warrant that. in fact as soon as i touched it i said, "oh no, this is gonna cost me."

i then checked the back to see who the publisher is: princeton. "dang. princeton."

and kathy's a pretty smart lady; i doubt she would have assigned it if it weren't a significant work.

significant indeed. all around this text are signs that scream, "I'M OF CONSEQUENCE! THIS IS A SERIOUS TEXT." the book itself (as opposed to the text) does a pretty good job of proving baumann's point that academia is a power of legitimization, at least for grad students. and instead of doubting the text and its soulless writing, i doubt myself, my ability to recognize "good" work. we have kathy, the author, the publisher, the mona lisa, the princeton name and all the prestige imbued by the people who've made it a great school channeled into one text, telling me what to think.

and i agree that, while unbearably dry, this book is important.

but can i even claim that opinion as my own anymore?

so while i await tomorrow's class to shed some light on this text, i'll contemplate this rothko:

I think Baumann’s book affords us a good example of analyzing a cultural phenomenon from the perspective of sociology and maybe history. He has come down to every social aspect you can think of to account for the rising status of American film. Targeted at American film, he compares filmgoing in contexts of different countries; he anatomizes the specific roles inside the film production as well as the social and historian causes of the formation of the audiences; in a Bourdieu’s sense he stresses the role of the intellectuals in constructing the notion of American film as art. Sociologists are known for studying the arts in a way that focusing on constructing images of art as a social type and therefore have been criticized by art professionals for a lack of attention to the creative process and individual artistic personalities. But Baumann here managed to acknowledge the importance of aesthetic imperatives and the individual creative process by covering the self-promotion of directors (though not in length). At last he draws a general schema “the legitimation framework” that can be applied to the study of other artistic media, which is worth considering.

The question I am thinking about is the contradiction between his whole project trying to give reasons for Hollywood’s changing into art, and the perspective he adopts—the social constructionism. When answering why European intellectuals were willing to perceive film as art much earlier than the American intellectuals, he charges the non-equivalence to the different climate and culture in the two places at that time, and says: “Neither reason is based on a perception that European films were more artistic than American films.” (29) By saying so, Baumann dismisses the notion of art, and that’s the typical social constructionist way of viewing art—the notion of art is just a matter of social convention. If so, why would he bother so much to defense Hollywood/American film, claiming that we Americans certainly can produce artistic films—it’s just we weren’t given the opportunity earlier before. In the same page with the quote above, he indicates that Europeans can make it so early to treat film as art because their culture “was characterized by a withdrawal from aesthetic traditions and a search for alternative models.” For me, this revolutionary search within the expressing form itself, is more than anything the characteristic of art.

Hollywood and Race

Although some would agree that Baumann should not have left out the aesthetic side of film history, I believe he has every reason to, especially considering that the success of a film and the acclaim of the director at times does not have anything to do with aesthetic quality. I definitely agree with Baumann that if one wants to study the history of film, it is best to study it from a sociological perspective, examining how economic, political, cultural, and social events shaped films. To claim that every film that has been included in the film canon is there because of its aesthetic and artistic quality is simply untrue. At times, success has nothing to do with quality, and this is hard to admit.

For my case-in-point, I would like to use the brilliant African-American director, Melvin Van Peebles as an example of how Hollywood in the 1960s still undermined directors of color, despite the fact that their films were of aesthetic quality. Upon directing several short films, notably Pickup Men for Herrick, Peebles attempted to get Hollywood to screen his work. However, Peebles was unable to find anyone there who was willing to hire him as a director. Fortunately, Henry Langlois, founder of the Cinémathèque Française, after viewing Peebles work, decided to screen his films, which led to Peebles moving to Paris to continue his work.

What I find very disturbing, however, is the fact that Peebles was only approached by Hollywood ,after making his first feature length film, The Story of the Three-Day Pass, because they mistook him for a French director. Stories likes these prove unequivocally, that the study of film history cannot be placed solely on aesthetics. Baumann's endeavor to re-position film history, definitely has motivated me to examine works in and outside of the American film canon not only from an aesthetic perspective, but to try to study the historical times out of which they were produced, where I am positive that I would find that certain films were not higher in aesthetic quality, but simply had more of an opportunity to succeed than others.

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.

No More Close Readings Please!

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!