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EDITORIAL
THE POWER AND
THE RESPONSIBILITY
£MNEMA is no longer merely a pastime; it is a power. Films
have ceased to be toys; they have become tools: two-edged tools which are able to create or destroy. The responsibility of those working in the film industry is a grave one. One of our more enlightened film makers, to whom I was talking the other day, described this responsibility as almost frightening; he pointed out that if a man corrupts a child he is sent to prison, yet he may make a corrupt film with impunity.
Cinema derives its power from man’s innate love for stories. All the world loves a story; particularly a picture-story; throughout history picture-stories have been used as a medium of expressing ideas. What are the parables of the gospel but beautiful picture stories? In using moving-pictures as a medium of culture, enlightenment and education, the Catholic Church is following the footsteps of her Founder: Our Lord Jesus Christ.
Cinema has access in unique and subtle ways to the faculties of sight and hearing: main gateways to personality, hence its responsibility. Morally, spiritually, intellectually, a man is what he thinks. “There is nothing in the intellect which was not in the senses first,’’ says St. Thomas Aquinas. Every deed is first a picture in the mind. Good mental pictures bring forth good deeds. Evil mental pictures bring forth evil deeds. The Catholic Church, commissioned to teach all nations, is minding its own business, therefore, in helping to make the cinema a moral, artistic and intellectual force for the benefit of the world.
To a delegation of The International Federation of the Motion Picture Press, in 1934, Pope Pius XI said: “It is necessary to apply to the cinema the supreme rule which must direct and regulate the great gift of an art, in order that it may not find itself in continual conflict with Christian morality and even with simple morality based upon the natural law. The essential purpose of art; its raison d’etre is to assist in the perfection of the moral personality which is man and for this reason it must itself be moral.’’
Focus believes that by encouraging criticism, analysis and appreciation it can help the cinema to become a medium of expressing Christian ideas.