The Hollywood Brand by Peter M. Catapano

Author:Peter M. Catapano [Catapano, Peter M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Popular Culture, Sociology, General, Media Studies
ISBN: 9781351183246
Google: 4s1JDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-01-31T02:32:44+00:00

Münsterberg constructed the film spectator as passive in light of the seductively realistic series of images that appeared on the screen. Like Lindsay, he suggested that the moral health of the nation might be at risk in the face of unregulated cinema that catered to the lowest instincts of its audience. However, he also shared with Lindsay a belief in film’s potential as an instrument of social reform because of the powerful influence it exerted upon its audience.

Movies for Movies’ Sake?

In The Photoplay, Münsterberg was conflicted between his regard for film as an art with intrinsic value separate from any social application and its instrumental value. Beauty was, for him, art’s greatest social value, and that “we annihilate beauty when we link the artistic creation to practical interests.”73 However, he did not believe in movies for movies’ sake, in the sense that moving pictures ought to avoid social references completely or all naturalistic modes of representation. As we have seen, he acknowledged the non-fiction film’s potential “to supplement the school room and the newspaper and the library by spreading information and knowledge.”74 To this end, he endorsed plans by educators to create a “Universal Culture Lyceum” that would “make and circulate moving pictures for the education of the youth of the land, picture studies in science, history, and religion, literature, geography, biography, art, architecture, social science, economics and industry.”75

Notwithstanding this interest in the social utility of the documentary, The Photoplay is chiefly a theory of the aesthetics of the fiction film. Münsterberg believed that moving pictures had a practical role to play by providing representations of moral and educational value, but, more importantly, he privileged popular cinema’s ability to stir the nation’s collective soul. Like Lindsay, he embraced the challenge of creating a healthy form of popular cinema for the clientele of the dark houses. At the height of the nickelodeon craze, many reforming activists had sought to censor or ban the moving-picture shows altogether. But Münsterberg argued that the audience for the motion picture had changed in the intervening years. Writing in 1915, he remarked that:

Six years ago, a keen sociological observer characterized the patrons of the picture palaces as “lower middle class and the massive public, youths and shopgirls between adolescence and maturity, small dealers, peddlers, laborers, charwomen, beside the small quota of children.” This would be hardly a correct description today. This “lower middle class” has long been joined by the upper class.76

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