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PERSPECTIVES OF A SOCIOLOGY OF FILM
of what Plato had supposed.' I do not intend to discuss the difficult questions which have arisen in connection with Aristotle's katharsis theory.1 Relevant here is only that Professor Collingwood regards Aristotle's Poetics as a contribution to a theory of amusement. 'The problem is the decadence of the Greek world: its symptoms, its causes, and its possible remedies. Among its symptoms, as Plato rightly contended, was the supersession of the old magico-religious art by a new amusement art — the art, in fact, of a Waste Land.' Now, while it is certainly true that Aristotle was not a disciple of T. S. Eliot, the problem remains whether philosophy, so far as it is concerned with a world as it is, can afford, now as then, to reject 'amusement art' as a legitimate product of human creativeness? It is certainly important to study the perennial controversy between Plato and Aristotle about poetry in order to gain norms for a possible attitude towards our contemporary amusement art as exemplified by the film. Other great transitional periods of Western civilisation are of similar importance, for example, the decline of the Roman Empire or the epoch which Huizinga has covered in his study, The Waning of the Middle Ages. The dangerous and disruptive character of pure amusement art is undeniable. But film is not, or need not be, a pure amusement form of art.
To be sure, a sociologically conceived aesthetics of film has still to be written, but even without such a theory there can be no doubt that there exist already in all countries a considerable number of film-classics which may indicate normative trends for future development. No country has, perhaps, contributed more — to speak only of war-time developments — than Great Britain to making film into a new popular art form.
To achieve this aim, certain prerequisites have to be fulfilled. At present the emotional attitudes of modern film audiences are
1 Cf. particularly George Thomson, Aeschylus and Athens. A Study in the Social Origins of Drama. London, 1941 . Professor Thomson's study may serve as an important and indispensable correction of Collingwood's interpretation. Aristotle's katharsis theory was much more in line with the mythical tradition of Greek life than Collingwood seems to admit. Cf. Thomson op. cit., pp. 372 sqq. All the same, I felt justified in using Professor Collingwood's discussion of the relation of Plato and Aristotle to poetry as an introduction to a theme to which so many thinkers throughout the ages of European civilisation have contributed. It must be remembered that if Aristotle's conception of katharsis was bound up with the socio-mythical background of Greek civilisation it would seem to have been a mistake of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to take katharsis as an a priori condition of any audience. I shall return to this problem in the forthcoming investigations on film audiences, and show that katharsis has to be reinterpreted according to the specific sociological conditions of historic audiences. See also: S. H. Butcher, Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, London 1895.
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