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CHAPTER 7
Movies and Conduct
Since the time when the film began to establish itself as one of the principal forms of contemporary entertainment, many books have been written about its general significance — as a new art form, as an instrument of propaganda, as a fascinating and complex industry, and as a sociological factor. It is with this last aspect of the cinema that we are concerned here, and it is one which has received the least serious attention hitherto. Passing references to the cinema as an important influence, especially with regard to children and adolescents, have been frequent enough, and it would be untrue to say that writers on sociological topics have failed to recognise this vital new factor in their analyses of the contemporary social milieu; but there is a great dearth of detailed empirical evidence in most of the comment which has so far been put before the public. Opinions, often violently phrased, have been voiced in favour of and against the cinema's popularity, but the arguments put forward have in most cases been unsupported by facts.
There is one notable exception to these strictures : a study published in the U.S.A. in 1933, in the Payne Fund Series Youth and the Movies. It is by Herbert Blumer, Professor of Sociology in the University of Chicago, and is entitled Movies and Conduct. Professor Blumer's aim, as given in his introduction, is 'to ascertain the kinds of influence wielded by motion pictures on conduct, in so far as these can be determined from personal accounts'. His method is to present rather than to evaluate the evidence, and his commentary on it is chiefly elucidatory.
The material which he uses is extracted from 'motion picture autobiographies' secured from a body of 1,823 young Americans of varying race, colour and religion. 634 of these were obtained from university students, 431 from college and junior college students, 583 from high school children, 67 from office workers, and 58 from factory workers. In order that the authors of the docu
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