The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre & Other Aspects of Popular Culture

From the author's preface: I have been writing about the movies, off and on, since 1947, and in the past few years it seems to me I have been able to recognize in my work a point of view-perhaps I mean only a vocabulary-that begins to be adequate to the complexities of the subject, doing some justice to the claims both of art and of "popular culture", and remaining also, I hope, in touch with the basic relation of spectator and object. I have felt my work to be most successful when it has seemed to display the movies as an important element in my own cultural life, an element with its own qualities and interesting in its own terms, and neither esoteric nor alien. The movies are part of my culture, and it seems to me that their special power has something to do with their being a kind of "pure" culture, a little like fishing or drinking or playing baseball-a cultural fact, that is, which has not yet fallen altogether under the discipline of art. I have not brought Henry James to the movies or the movies to Henry James, but I hope I have shown that the man who goes to the movies is the same as the man who reads James. In the long run, I hope that my work may even make some contribution to the "legitimization" of the movies; but I do not think one can make such a contribution by pretending that "legitimization" has already taken place. I propose now to produce a book of essays on the movies, dealing with various key aspects of the subject, which will adequately express this point of view. While I believe that I have by now developed a kind of "theory" of the movies, and would expect this theory to emerge from my book, it will be in no sense a theoretical work. There are many theories of the movies-who would not wish to be the Aristotle of a new art form? My own ambition, in the present work, is only to produce a body of criticism dealing with specific films and types of films, with certain actors, certain themes, and with two or three of the general problems which may point towards a theory. If it is successful, the book should bring its readers pleasure and illumination in connection with one of the leading elements in modern culture, and perhaps go some way towards resolving the curious tension that surrounds the problem of "popular culture." At the best, I hope the volume may possibly be a contribution to literature.