Today's moviegoers and critics generally consider some Hollywood products--even some blockbusters--to be legitimate works of art. But during the first half century of motion pictures very few Americans would have thought to call an American movie "art." Up through the 1950s, American movies were regarded as a form of popular, even lower-class, entertainment. By the 1960s and 1970s, however, viewers were regularly judging Hollywood films by artistic criteria previously applied only to high art forms. In Hollywood Highbrow, Shyon Baumann for the first time tells how social and cultural forces radically changed the public's perceptions of American movies just as those forces were radically changing the movies themselves.
The development in the United States of an appreciation of film as an art was, Baumann shows, the product of large changes in Hollywood and American society as a whole. With the postwar rise of television, American movie audiences shrank dramatically and Hollywood responded by appealing to richer and more educated viewers. Around the same time, European ideas about the director as artist, an easing of censorship, and the development of art-house cinemas, film festivals, and the academic field of film studies encouraged the idea that some American movies--and not just European ones--deserved to be considered art.
Author(s): Shyon Baumann
Series: Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology, 2
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Year: 2007
Language: English
Pages: 241
City: Princeton
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
Acknowledgments
CHAPTER I Introduction: Drawing the Boundaries of Art
The Central Argument
How Do We Know What Art Is?
American Film History
The Social Construction of Art
The Creation of Artistic Status: Opportunity, Institutions, and Ideology
Outline of the Chapters
CHAPTER 2 The Changing Opportunity Space: Developments i nthe Wider Social Context
The First World War and Urban-American Life: Two Disparate Influences on Film Attendance in Europe and the United States
Post-World War I I Changes in the Size and Composition of American Film Audiences
Summary
CHAPTER 3 Change from Within: New Production and Consumption Practices
Film Festivals
Self-Promotion of Directors
Ties to Academia
United States, England, Germany, Italy, and France: Changes in the Industrial and Social History of Film
Purification through Venue: From Nickelodeons to Art Houses
Prestige Productions
The Ebb of Censorship and the Coming of Art
The Crisis of the 1960s Forced Hollywood down New Paths
Summary
CHAPTER 4 The Intellectualization of Film
Early U.S. Film Discourse
The Intellectualization of Film Reviews: 1925-1985
Film Reviews Approach Book Reviews: A Comparison with Literature
1960s Advertisements Incorporate Film Review
Foreign Film: A Pathway to High Art for Hollywood
Cultural Hierarchy, the Relevance of Critics, and the Status of Film as Art
Summary
CHAPTER 5 Mechanisms for Cultural Valuation
Why a Middlebrow Art?
Film Consumption as Cultural Capital
An Emphasis on Intellectualizing Discourse
Integration of Factors
The Study of Cultural Hierarchy
Notes
References
Index
