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PERSPECTIVES OF A SOCIOLOGY OF FILM than people who hear without seeing. In this matter one must make a significant allowance for the sociology of the large city. The intercourse of such a city, compared with that of a small town, shows an immeasurable preponderance of visual, over auditory, impact, and not only because a relatively high number of the street encounters in a small town are with familiar people, with whom one exchanges a word or whose appearance conjures up for us their whole and not merely their visible personalities — but above all through the medium of improved public services. Before the development of omnibuses, railways, and tramways in the nineteenth century, people were not generally in the position of being able to look at each other for hours and minutes at a time without speaking to each other. Modern communications produce something which concerns by far the greater proportion of the finer relations between man and man: this ever-increasing tendency to pure visual-mindedness must therefore provide an entirely changed basis for the general sociological attitudes to men. The above-mentioned bewilderment (Raetselhqftigkeit) of those people who only see as opposed to those who only hear produces the displacement which I have already discussed, and contributes to the problem of the modern attitude to life generally, isolation or loneliness and the feeling of being surrounded on all sides by locked doors.' The modern cinema and its impact on contemporary life is the most powerful confirmation of Simmel's analysis.
Simmel's sociology of the senses as indicated in these sentences is, of course, only an application of Karl Marx's theory of the estrangement of the human being (Selbstentfremdung des Menschen) which is the guiding theme from his early writings to Das Kapital. The outwardness of our contemporary life which, as I hope, is now more clearly demonstrated against the background of Elizabethan civilisation, requires vigilance and conscious re-adjustment to the powers of reason. Such a re-adjustment is not impossible in view of the fact that films are planned and made by a controllable industrial process.
Perhaps I should explain here why the economic structure of the British film industry— and that of other countries, too — is not being touched upon. Not that I regard the property or social structure of the British film industry as unimportant: on the contrary. But in recent years discussion has, in my "opinion, concentrated too much on this economic aspect. The recent White Paper on Tendencies to Monopoly in the Cinematograph Film Industry,1 to give
1 London. H.M. Stationery Office, 1944. 21