APPENDIX 2: CORRELATING ANNUAL ASSESSMENTS OF SUCCESS AT THE
UK BOX OFFICE
In order to pursue my exploration of popular cinema’s routine
representations of women in the post war period, I needed to know
which were the most popular films at the UK box office. There is
no simple answer to this question: the popular is not exactly
equivalent to the financially successful, neither can it be said
to conform to the requirements of any discrete social grouping.
Popularity, in the field of mass culture where the popular
objects are the product of more or less industrialised processes,
is the consequence of temporary synonymities of taste, and the
economic success of the product is itself the consequence of this
synonymity.
Drawing general conclusions, making broad assessments of the
developments and changes in the popularity of films over an
appreciable historical perid, which my question requires me to
do, inevitably involves some method of sampling the possible
range of available material. In arriving at a sampling method
it is clearly imperative to keep the purposes of the
investigation in mind. A method appropriate to one purpose might
be meaningless for another. Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson (The
Classical Hollywood Film RKP 1985) used a randomly chosen sample
of films as the basis for their analyses. They used the list
published in The 1961 Film Daily Yearbook (ed.Bahn publ. NY Film
Daily 1961) of 29.998 titles released in the USA between 1915 and
1960, and after 'eliminating all titles not from an American
studio' used a random number table to select 851 titles of which
they located 100 for detailed study.
Our selection procedures represent the closest a researcher
can come to random sampling when dealing with historical
artefacts. The point remains that our choices were not
biased by personal preferences or conceptions of
influential or masterful films.
Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson 1985 op cit p388.
Since their project was to define and describe the cultural
product loosely referred to as the 'classical Hollywood picture'
it clearly made sense for them to develop a sampling method which
could remain independent of evaluative judgements and theoretical
constructs both contemporary with and subsequent to the
production of the films themselves. This is in stark contrast
to the claim in the 1986 publicity for the then forthcoming
International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers:
The selection in this volume has been made by an
international advisory board of notable film scholars,
critics and archivists. Entries in Films have been selected
on the basis of each film's importance in cinematic history
and its broad cultural significance.
Firethorn Press publicity 1986.
The work contains a mere 500 entries and can therefore hardly
avoid representing a distillation of already existing historical
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