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PERSPECTIVES OF A SOCIOLOGY OF FILM
What I intend to discuss here are not the qualitative features of this film influence, but rather its sociological presuppositions, which explain its possibility and potentiality.
First, of course, there is the easy availability of the cinema. But while the cheapness of a cinema seat may explain the decline of the theatre's numerical appeal, it would not explain the decline of the music hall. It seems that our modern cinema-going millions are more 'passive' than the music-hall audiences of the nineteenth century. In using the term 'passive' I refer to a profound and distinct change in our contemporary sensorium, a fact which cannot be appreciated from a purely 'psychological' approach towards cinema problems.
Graham Wallas has already in 1908 drawn our attention to 'the non-rational character' in politics, and one need only study the influence of films and 'political propaganda' which the National Socialist Party used in Germany before and after 1933 to realise the enormous potentialities of visualisation in the formation of 'political' beliefs, or of any beliefs. To give only one historical illustration: the medieval miracle play was consciously devised as a means of making the liturgical Latin intelligible. 'The growth of the medieval religious drama pursues the same course in England as in the other Catholic countries of Europe . . . Priests (we are told) had very laudably introduced this dramatic appeal "in order to fortify the unlearned in their faith". These words reveal to us the original purpose of Christian drama: it was to be a sort of living picture-book for those to whom the Latin of the liturgy was unintelligible.'1 Yet visualisation as a legitimate means of spiritual and artistic education and the non-rational character of human conceptuality are two different problems which must be clearly distinguished.
The pre-logical structure of the human mind (even if we are able to explain this fact rationally) is present in all cultures, including our own society. I believe it to be the unchallengeable result of Levy-Bruhl's studies on the primitive mind that he has found our modern abstractions always presuppose and suggest mythical elements. Concepts like soul, life, death, society, order, are illustrations of this thesis.2
1 Cf. George Sampson, The Concise Cambridge History of Literature, Cambridge, I94i5 P235
8 Perhaps I may draw the reader's attention to R. G. Collingwood's criticism of Levy-Bruhl. Cf. Collingwood, The Principles of Art, p. 62. C.'s criticism is facile and unconvincing. He does not even realise that Lesfonctions mentales dans les sociitis primitives in which Levy-Bruhl has stated the pre-logical structure of
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