The Movies and Social Observation: Reading Blumer's Movies and Conduct

This article focuses on an early work of Herbert Blumer, Movies and Conduct , a study which reports the reactions of moviegoers to motion pictures. Contrasting Blumer's study with contemporary feminist film studies which are based on a psychoanalytically oriented semiotics, I argue that Blumer's contribution to sociology was an observational methodology of documentation and description, generally known as Symbolic Interactionism, which drew on a cinematographic sense of vision. At the same time, this methodology claimed a scientific objectivity for social observation by erasing from it any traces of the visual erotic which constituted both early cinema and the psychoanalytic interpretation of the subject. Thus, Blumer's methodology presents itself as “sexless.”