International Review of Educational Cinematography (Jan-Dec 1934)

52 THE CINEMA IN TEACHING astronomical time coincide with psychological time. Is not the former perhaps the result of an abstraction ? Is not concrete time really physiological time ? If this be so, then it is useless to measure physical time in units of psychological time. P. Lecomte du Nouy of the Pasteur Institute has demonstrated that young and old people, joined in the same space, live in separate universes, where the value of time is completely different. For a man of 50, time passes four times as fast as for a child of ten years. Adults who condemn children to remain five hours a day on their school benches never realize that, psychologically and physiologically speaking, five hours amount to 20 hours for a child. Then they are surprised at the impatience of young things. When they realize these facts, will they still insist on the school hours and the curricula at present in vogue ? If we add to the foregoing considerations further observations relating to the different duration of the attention when it is auricular and when visual — the relation is in the ratio of 10 to 40 — the necessity of solving the problem of the pupil's scholastic life with the systematic introduction of the cinema become more evident. Its use, moreover, should not be regulated by caprice, chance or circumstances, but according to a well thought out programme besed on the curriculum. The Adult Cinema I will now turn to in the Impressions another kind of consiof Children. deration. The cinema is based on emotion. The emotional quali ties and content of a film are the factors which determine its success. The sentiment informing the picture is expressed in scenes and action. The scene is like the solution of a problem with no unknown factors. It is indeed an operation rather than a problem. Our first efforts, in my opinion, ought to assume the form of taking the educational cinema destined for children away from the emotive plane and placing it on another. There should be a law preventing children frequenting cinemas intended for adult persons. It is difficult to imagine the immoral contagion that spreads from even one of the more innocent type of erotic-sentimental films. If the child is ingenuous, he becomes bored and disgusted with the series of embraces, and has an instinctive feeling that a mystery that should be revealed as an impulse is being cut up into synthetic fragments of film. There is for him in such pictures a sensual incentive which he does not understand. Who would think of taking a child into the company of fast women, and what in most cases is the cinema star when playing a love part but such a woman ? I have examined thousands of exercises and essays in which the pupils have narrated their Sunday impressions after visiting the cinema. Some of these studies do not differ very much from the yelping of little dogs taken to a concert hall and irritated to vocal rivalry by the sound of one of the instruments in the orchestra. Other essays show that a period in a young person's life has begun when hypocrisy and double meanings cover up vice. I will not touch on the hygienic considerations which are self-evident and can be seen in the ill effects deriving from over-crowding, bad air, smoke and nervous excitement. Making Films for If we are going to keep Children to Suit children away from the their Psychology. cinemas for grown up people, we must undertake the preparation of films for children. This is a point where it seems to me ideas are not very clear, nor is there much agreement as to what is wanted. It is vaguely believed that films which amuse and instruct children are the best that can be hoped for. Amuse and instruct : these are two antithetic terms. It is no paradox of mine to state that what arouses interest does not instruct, while still less instructive are the things that amuse. To believe we can eliminate effort in the spiritual formation of any being is only a sugary pedagogic Utopia.