A Cultural Approach to Emotional Disorders by E. Deidre Pribram

Author:E. Deidre Pribram [Pribram, E. Deidre]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Media Studies, Psychology, Emotions, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317700661
Google: SapeCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-01-13T02:52:09+00:00

Emotions in the Vernacular Modernism of Cinema

Defining modernism as a range of aesthetic and cultural practices that “reflects upon the processes of modernization and the experience of modernity,” film scholar Miriam Hansen argues for the importance of recognizing alternative forms of modernism beyond ‘high art’ (333). Modernist aesthetics, as a reflection of the experiences of modernity, also encompass “mass-produced and mass-consumed” aesthetic practices, which she identifies as “vernacular modernism” (Ibid.). Vernacular modernism incorporates the popular and the quotidian, recalling Bourdieu’s references to the ‘ordinariness’ of popular aesthetics. Prominent among these vernacular forms is Hollywood cinema, which emerged and developed contemporaneously to “‘high’ or ‘hegemonic modernism’” (332).

Hansen’s point is that cinema, “as an industrially produced, mass-based” medium, and as a means of representing the “particular historical experience” of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, qualifies as a legitimate, extensive, and highly significant modernist mode, operating parallel to the high modernism of the formal and political avant-gardes (337, 341). In this analysis, mass produced or reproduced culture is a critical attribute of modernity and modernism, and not a series of cultural events working to undermine and embarrass the cause of high art.

The latter view, that popular culture works toward the goal of undermining the pure aesthetic or, at the very least, fails to grasp its import is exemplified by Dutch sociologist Christine Delhaye, writing in the early 1990s. She describes “the cultural elite in both the Netherlands and abroad” being dismayed by the popularization (tourists overwhelming the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam) and commercialization (endless merchandise being snapped up) of all aspects of the Van Gogh legacy (16). The result is a “sense of embarrassment” felt with regard to all forms of “cultural expression” featuring or associated with Van Gogh (16). As a consequence, popular culture “appropriations” of Van Gogh have made it difficult “to read Van Gogh’s art independently of all the negative connotations with which popular culture has burdened it” (16). These statements demonstrate an ongoing need for high art to exist in distinction, in Bourdieu’s terms, from the masses, suggesting a continuation of the cultural divide between high art and popular culture that has typified much of twentieth century modernism. Struggle over cultural ownership is raised by Delhaye in the notion of ‘appropriation,’ which assumes that Van Gogh, the modern artist, properly belongs to high art but has been removed from his rightful position. Further, popular culture’s effects serve only to obscure, but can never clarify, the meanings and value of Van Gogh’s work, rendering it difficult, perhaps impossible, to accurately interpret or properly appreciate his art. Finally, in this view, popular culture’s contributions to the Van Gogh legend are wholly “negative,” functioning only as a burden, never an asset. In these statements, we find exemplification of Bourdieu’s arguments that high art’s mandate rests in distinguishing itself from a mass or everyday culture against which the pure aesthetic is formulated.

In contrast, Hansen points out that cinema was perceived as the “incarnation of the modern,” the “very symbol” of modern

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