Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1999 09:11:07 -0500
From: Chris Cagle <Paul_Cagle-AT-Brown.edu>
Subject: re: bourdieu and the movies


Ing=F3lfur =C1sgeir J=F3hannesson wrote:

>I have been asked to write something about movies, and as I have been using
>Bourdieu's ideas/conceptionson social strategies and capital for years, I
>ask if any of you has been using these ideas about film and the social
>strategies in using film-watching as capital ... Has Bourdieu written
>anything about this? Has any other "Bourdieuean" done so?

As I am working within cinema studies and trying to assess the implications
of Bourdieu for film theory, I'm rather interested in this question myself.
It seems, however, Bourdieu himself has little to say directly about the
cinema. Most extensively, Distinction has a section (starts p. 26 in the
Harvard UP edition) devoted to apperception of distinction in films, most
notably in the statistical probability to know films by directors.
Photography also explores the 'moyen' arts, of which cinema is one--
popular arts reclaimed and given some semi-legitimate status.

Both of these works seem suggestive to me: the first on the development of
an 'art cinema' genre, the second on, among other things, the historical
rise of auteurism and of film criticism. However, there still is the work
of relating Bourdieu's ideas to the specifics of film texts and film
history. And the question of the value of textual reading proper.

=46or me, I'm working on the Hollywood Social Problem film, suggesting that
the very likelihood of audience members recognizing these films as a genre,
as 'social problem films' depended on their cultural capital, and it's one
of the clearer connections I've seen in film of the relation between
aesthetic competence (recognizing 'quality' in cinema) and political
competence (recognizing a 'social problem' in, say, alcoholism) that
Bourdieu spells out in Distinction and elsewhere.

I'd be interested in hearing other approaches film-people are taking or
seeing dialogue on these issues.

As for those in Anglo-American cinema studies using Bourdieu, there aren't
many I've found who use him in a remotely thorough way, but two approaches
that I HAVE found useful are Marianne Conroy's articles on Imitation of
Life (in The Hidden Foundation) and on method acting (Criticism, Spring 93)
and Charles O'Brien's essay on Dreyer's Jeanne d'Arc (Cinema Journal,
Summer 96).

I'd like to hear if people know of other useful work, from other national
contexts, from a more sociological angle, or anything really.

Cheers,
Chris Cagle

Brown University
Paul_Cagle-AT-brown.edu
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