ABSTRACT
There have been many attempts at understanding the relations between film and culture. They have occurred under various headings: film and society, film and politics, film and mass culture, for example. Some analyses have focused on the relations between film and trends within popular culture (‘gross-out’ teen movies and changing sexual mores, for example), while others have used film as documentary evidence of movements within social history. In many cases, such analyses have assumed a more or less ‘reflectionist’ relationship between film and society. That is, film is seen as a ‘reflection’ of the dominant beliefs and values of its culture; if American musicals of the 1940s were Utopian and optimistic, then this must reflect the society’s optimism. (An example of such an argument would be Richard Griffith’s ‘Cycles and genres’ (1949).) It should be clear from the rest of this book that such an approach is too primitive: we know, for instance, that American society also produced the alienated and cynical genre of film noir during the 1940s – which reflection was the accurate one? The metaphor of reflection is also unsatisfactory because it bypasses the process of selection and combination that goes into the composition of any utterance, whether in film, prose, or conversation. Further, between society and this so-called mirror is interposed a whole set of competing and conflicting cultural, subcultural, industrial, and institutional determinants.
