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CONCLUSIONS AND POSTULATES 'objective' point of view will have to meet considerable difficulties. But these difficulties can be solved and they must be solved, provided we intend to use the most powerful 'educational' instrument of our time constructively.
As history of literature studies, or should study, the development of forms (e.g., of plays, and novels), the emergence of subjects and their relation to the social problems of epoch and generation, so the sociological history of film might study, for instance, the stress on the intimacy and holiness of family life in recent American and British films (Until We Meet Again, Under the Clock, This Happy Breed, Perfect Strangers) as a definite stage in the historic development of the cinema. Wars tend to uproot family lives. Here the film assumes the function of visualising (and unfortunately of romanticising) values which are adrift. So much about a different approach towards a sociology of film.
Clearly it is not for the author to summarise his book which has painfully become part of his life. Yet two main conclusions appear to stand out in my mind:
( i ) Many of my contributors attribute to film that it helps them to discover their 'personalities'. In fact, just the opposite is true. When you adapt your behaviour according to the vision you have of Miss Greer Garson, you do not become a Greer Garson (or a Laurence Olivier) , you only identify yourself with a type, for you don't know anything about Miss Greer Garson's personality, you only see a film type. So all over the country, from North to South, from East to West, we meet the same pitiful Greer Garsons or Laurence Oliviers, but the individualities in our time are on the verge of disappearing altogether.
It is important to contrast here the theatre and the cinema. Sir Max Beerbohm, in a recent broadcast, has given an admirable illustration of their difference. He is speaking of the Edwardian theatre.1
'Actors and actresses were certainly regarded with far greater interest than they are nowadays. The outstanding ones inspired something deeper than interest. It was with excitement, with wonder and with reverence, with something akin even to hysteria, that they were gazed upon. Some of the younger of you listeners would, no doubt, if they could, interrupt me at this point by asking, "But surely you don't mean, do you, that our parents and grandparents were affected by them as we are by cinema stars?" I would assure you that those idols were even more ardently worshipped 1 Cf. 'The Listener', Play goings by Sir Max Beerbohm, Oct. i ith, 1945.
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