Sociology of film : studies and documents (1946)

CHAPTER 8 The Content of Films Earlier volumes in the Payne Fund series Motion Pictures and Youth established beyond question that the attitudes, emotions, and behaviour of children and young people are influenced by the cinema. Mr. Edgar Dale's study, The Content of Motion Pictures, goes a step further and aims at analysing the content of motion pictures, taking for its material the bulk of the motion picture output in certain selected years. One inherent difficulty, which the author notes in his preface, is that different individuals do not react in the same way to the same stimuli, or as Mr. Dale puts it, 'content is a function of the individual who views that particular picture.' It is, however, a fact that most persons are so conditioned that there is a sufficient degree of similarity in their response to make the findings of a study of this kind valuable. In the case of children and young people of very diverse age groups and levels of experience, a more specialised enquiry is necessary, but, as a means of obtaining a broad idea of the various stimuli to be found in films and of the manner of their operation, the technique employed by Mr. Dale would appear to be adequate. As no comparable attempt to isolate the essential ingredient of motion pictures has been made hitherto, the first problem of the author was to evolve a valid method for tackling his material. He decided eventually to make analyses of three different degrees of intensity. The most comprehensive but least detailed method he applied to 1,500 films in all: 500 from the year 1920, 500 from 1925, and 500 from 1930: this meant that he covered practically the entire output of feature films from the major companies in those years. The aim of this first analysis was simply to classify major themes, and the material used consisted of written precis of the stories of the films. It was clear that only a rough indication of content could 169