Sociology of film : studies and documents (1946)

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MOVIES AND CONDUCT highly receptive to films which exhibit love-making, especially if they can derive from them any hints as to how to proceed in their own affairs. This may be partial explanation of the intense popularity of stars who specialise in the more elaborate kinds of courtship. That quite young girls and boys are interested in love scenes in films, and like to re-enact them among themselves, or at any rate try to copy the techniques employed, is indicated by the numerous extracts from the motion picture autobiographies which Professor Blumer quotes. Thus one sixteen-year-old girl writes — 'What movie does not offer pointers in the art of kissing? I do not think it is surprising that the younger generation has such a fine technique' — and there are many more extracts in this vein, the ages of the writers ranging from fourteen to twenty-two years. It may be desirable at this point to mention again the possibility that a similar set of papers from British adolescents would show a less 'sophisticated' outlook. This would, we think, certainly be the case in the higher income groups, and even among the working classes it is improbable that the borrowing of 'love techniques' from the screen would be quite such a conscious art as it appears to be among young Americans. But this does not mean that the emotional effect on the British filmgoer would be any less powerful: it is simply that the American adolescent tends to attach greater importance at an early age to its relations with the opposite sex, and is sufficiently articulate to be able to describe its experience in a more sophisticated language than one would generally expect to find in the average adolescent of fourteen to sixteen in this country. This raises, naturally, the much wider problem to what extent 'national audiences' differ from each other, not only child or adolescent audiences. It is true that Hollywood has set itself certain universal film norms which are meant to provide a common 'human' denominator for any rational audience. Obviously this type of 'internationalism' is deceptive. A real and genuine internationalism could only be established by an untempered distribution of national films (French, Russian films, etc., etc.). Only in this way could the various 'national publics' appreciate and understand the profound differences of their respective societies — and of the films they produce. Must we say that a Russian girl kisses differently from a British girl and wants to be kissed differently — in spite of Hollywood's insistence on this point? In the long run it is likely that the direct 'imitation' of specific details of conduct which is so recurrent in Professor Blumer's material, is a less im