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THE CONTENT OF FILMS
weight should be given to films which had proved to be outstanding box-office successes than to pictures which were poorly attended: but the attempt to achieve this grading had to be abandoned on account of the inaccessibility of reliable information as to boxoffice returns.
Mr. Dale obviously ran into the same difficulties as we did while our investigations were proceeding. Box office statistics have been flatly refused to us. It would have been of interest to have been able to compare our sociological method with a statistical method, though I do not think we lost much as we were able to obtain enough verbal evidence from local managers with regard to boxoffice returns in order to check our findings. (We had no interest in improving the box-office returns of the film industry.)
Eventually the selection of films for the analysis was made quite at random, with a roughly appropriate proportion from each major producing company. When, however, a classification was made of the 500 pictures released in 1930, it was found that the proportions of each main type were more or less the same as the proportions of types in the 1 15 films chosen for the analysis.
The chief deficiency of this second level of analysis is that it fails to present the total context of any situation which it discusses. It was, therefore, decided to employ a third method of analysis which should aim at giving, as far as possible, the entire content of a number of films. Dialogue scripts were, accordingly, obtained from the producers for 40 pictures, and these were used in conjunction with the schedules prepared for the 'second level' analysis. The procedure was as follows : a number of trained observers, one or two per film, familiarised themselves with the dialogue script before viewing the picture. They made stenographic notes during their attendance at the cinema on all aspects of the film not covered by the dialogue script, i.e. detailed descriptions of clothes, settings, gestures, facial expressions, approximate age and economic status of the characters and so on.
Immediately after the show they 'rewrote' the film in the form of a narrative, based on a combination of the script and their own notes, with precise indications of every change of scene. These reviews provided a 'verbal description of what competent observers say has occurred on the motion picture screen': this, in Mr. Dale's opinion, is a fair definition of the phrase 'motion picture content'. He adds, quite correctly, that to describe the content of a film is not the same thing as to be able to predict its effects on an audience, and that any judgments he makes in the course of his book re
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