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USE AND ABUSE OF THE CINEMA
By Dr. Mario Bernabei,
Asst Professor Chair of Pedacogy at the University of Rome.
I. Cinema and the Tt is no longer sufficient
Life of Today. I today in order to demonstrate an averagely respectable degree of culture to read the daily papers and occasionally scan the literary and scientific reviews. It is necessary to frequent the cinema. In all circles of ordinary culture it is imperative for a person having any pretensions to living even a restricted society life to be able to give his opinions on current pictures, criticizing this or that film and praising the sensation of the week. In certain circles which one might call intellectual there can even be observed a sort of rivalry concerning who has seen the most films, and is best acquainted with the movements of the stars.
The cinema has penetrated into our every day life as few other institutions have done. It has got into our blood and become one of the reagents of our nervous system. Look at the young generation. There is not a boy of our time who does not become intensely interested in three things : football teams, the makes of automobiles and the cinema. Every professor in these three subjects becomes a scholar, every scholar a professor.
I have no intention of regreting the happy times when the cinema did not exist. I am enthusiastic about the motion picture, and a keen admirer of Charlie Chaplin, the most gifted artist of our epoch.
My own personal culture for some considerable time has been indebted to the cinema for many things. I recognize that if in the vast sea of commercial film production then, are some pictures which are not worth a penny, it is not rare for us to see others which compel admiration by their power and oblige us to think.
It is necessary to say this, because, apart from any unjust charges, I may be permitted to advance a little criticism ; to insert a trifle of doubt of a healthy and not ill-intentioned character into the mass of boundless praise and glorification of the film. Evil has never been anything else but a degeneration of good ; the abuse of the most healthy things may prove as harmful as a use of dangerous things. When we hear nothing but loudvoiced praise of the beneficent effect of the sun's rays, we are in danger of forgetting that it is the sun which sometimes causes sunstrokes.
2. Cerebral Hygiene. We ought to accustom The Brain should ourselves, I think, to be respected. speak of the cinema as
one speaks of and considers coffee, tea, cocaine, that is as of a substance that can be pleasurable but is also dangerous, owing to the strong excitement it L capable of producing in the most delicate nervous centres. Those who are enthusiastic for the instructional and educational cinema as a new and most effective method to which children's delicate minds can be subjected ought to reflect on this point seriously. I am sorry to have to act as a damper on enthusiasms, but to adopt the luminous projection in a dark room to impress notions on infantile brains is handling a double-edged waepon, which can be both useful and at the same time can cause disaster.
The same thing occurs in the treatment of nervous disorders with X rays. The identical rays used in differeut doses can cure the disease when it exists, and cause it when it does not exists.