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PREFACE
ment and advice have helped me greatly. The second and third chapters attempt appreciations of historic universal or popular audiences. I should have liked to give a more complete comparative sociological account of the history of audiences, but the task proved too immense for the time-table I had set myself.
Chapters IV, V, VI are studies in child and adolescent reactions. Chapter VII discusses adolescent reactions, taking Professor Blumer's pioneer work on Movies and Conduct as basis. Chapter VIII raises the problem of the contents of films. Chapter IX, almost a book by itself, gives documents of adult picture-goers and our comment on them. Chapter X, 'Conclusions and Postulates', was written shortly before the book went to press in order to make it as up to date as possible.
I must say I found this volume most difficult to write, not because the subject-matter is fleeting and visual and as such defying definite abstract concepts with which the sociologist must operate. No, I think the main difficulty which I had to face was that so many disciplines appear to meet when one attempts a sociological analysis of film: Psychology, Ethics, History, Political Science.
As my personal preferences in the latter three fields of human studies may easily be ascertained from my previous books, it may, perhaps, be opportune to say a word about those psychologists from whose works I had learnt before I became engaged in the present studies: Levy-Bruhl, Malinowski and Piaget helped me to clarify the concept of participation mystique. By MacCurdy's Structure of Morale, I was confirmed in my conviction that human norms and values cannot be separated from psychological mechanisms. Trained by Scheler's and Dilthey's work, I found MacCurdy's book was to me an important confirmation of long-held views. Victor von Weizsaecker's Studien zur Pathogeneses together with the works by the students already mentioned, helped me to realise how far off we still are from an adequate and satisfactory contemporary doctrine of what the human being really is.
It was this difficulty which led me to write this volume in such a 'subjective' manner. It is humility, not arrogance, which explains this personal approach. From beginning to end, I tried to write the book in such a way that the reader might, as it were, take part in the actual process of writing. I always meant to apply to a sociological investigation what Andre Gide had asked from the novelist in his Les Faux-Monnayeurs:
'Et . . . le sujet de ce roman?' writes Andre Gide. Tl n'en a pas. . . . Depuis plus d'un an que j'y travaille, il ne m'arrive rien
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