"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."
By:
Shyon Baumann
Imprint: Princeton University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Volume: 30
Dimensions:
Height: 235mm,
Width: 152mm,
Spine: 23mm
Weight: 454g
ISBN: 9780691125275
ISBN 10: 0691125279
Series: Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology
Pages: 248
Publication Date: 02 January 2008
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
College/higher education
,
Undergraduate
,
Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
List of Figures ix List of Tables xi Acknowledgments xiii CHAPTER 1: Introduction: Drawing the Boundaries of Art 1 The Central Argument 3 How Do We Know What Art Is? 4 American Film History 7 The Social Construction of Art 12 The Creation of Artistic Status: Opportunity, Institutions, and Ideology 14 Outline of the Chapters 18 CHAPTER 2: The Changing Opportunity Space: Developments in the Wider Social Context 21 The First World War and Urban-American Life: Two Disparate Influences on Film Attendance in Europe and the United States 23 Post-World War II Changes in the Size and Composition of American Film Audiences 32 Summary 51 CHAPTER 3: Change from Within: New Production and Consumption Practices 53 Film Festivals 54 Self-Promotion of Directors 59 Ties to Academia 66 United States, England, Germany, Italy, and France: Changes in the Industrial and Social History of Film 76 Purification through Venue: From Nickelodeons to Art Houses 88 Prestige Productions 92 The Ebb of Censorship and the Coming of Art 97 The Crisis of the 1960s Forced Hollywood down New Paths 105 Summary 108 CHAPTER 4: The Intellectualization of Film 111 Early U.S. Film Discourse 113 The Intellectualization of Film Reviews: 1925-1985 117 Film Reviews Approach Book Reviews: A Comparison with Literature 133 1960s Advertisements Incorporate Film Review 137 Foreign Film: A Pathway to High Art for Hollywood 148 Cultural Hierarchy, the Relevance of Critics, and the Status of Film as Art 155 Summary 159 CHAPTER 5: Mechanisms for Cultural Valuation 161 Why a Middlebrow Art? 163 Film Consumption as Cultural Capital 169 An Emphasis on Intellectualizing Discourse 171 Integration of Factors 173 The Study of Cultural Hierarchy 174 Notes 179 References 203 Index 217
Shyon Baumann is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Toronto.
Reviews for Hollywood Highbrow: From Entertainment to Art
Hollywood Highbrow: From Entertainment to Art is an important contribution to many disciplines: sociology of art and cinema, political economy of culture, American studies, cultural studies, even marketing, and, of course, film studies. --Yves LaBerge, Canadian Journal of Sociology What is perhaps most remarkable about Hollywood Highbrow is how it successfully synthesizes various causal explanations for how and why objects become culturally valorized. Here, Baumann presents an in-depth examination of how cultural hierarchies change, conceptualizing cultural hierarchies as mulitcausal 'processes'. --International Review of Modern Sociology In sum, I strongly encourage scholars of cultural phenomena to read this fine text. It is a clear and through presentation of an extremely complicated process, and so it should satisfy the interest of both experts and their students and colleagues. The book establishes a high place for Baumann among the new generation of scholars of culture, and I highly recommend it. --Jennifer C. Lena, American Journal of Sociology
