Revaluations

Abstract

It is logical for the debased and commercialised mass culture to be replaced by a true culture for the masses. It cannot be forgotten that for the greater completeness of that culture the social and intellectual participation of the masses themselves must be secured. To achieve this a powerful amateur cultural movement must have been developed.¹

Alan Lovell’s brief article ‘The Searchers and the Pleasure Principle’,² his critical positions in the revised Don Siegel American Cinema booklet and the paper by Jim Cook and Jim Hillier, The Growth of Film and Television Studies 1960–1975’³ mark the course of an important contemporary current in Film Studies. The current these articles signal is one of opposition to the way in which relations between culture, art and society had traditionally been made in Britain, and of espousal of the formula ‘Popular Culture’ that it is hoped will offer a potentiality for study of the cinema unvitiated by the governing principles of the British tradition of cultural studies; its élitism, conservatism, and individualism. Cook and Hillier construct the tradition thus:

Crudely the position might be expressed as follows: modern society is unsatisfactory because its industrial mechanistic nature prevents it from meeting the essential human needs like contact with work, nature and other human beings; great art as the direct creative expression of the individual offers a critique of modern society and embodies accordingly moral values; since the mass media are products of technology, one of the most important features of the industrial system, they cannot possibly be art and are in fact corrupting in that they express false moral values.

Screen Education, no. 22, Spring 1977.