International Review of Educational Cinematography (Jan-Dec 1934)

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USE AND ABUSE OF THE CINEMA 59 parody, something so instructive and pedagogic at all costs that it would cease to be cinema. The public, the vast anonymous mass that crowds the cheaper seats of our cinemas becomes a child again in front of the silver screen, and swallows everything offered it. Films of every kind follow one another on our screens. In some, the moral intention is clear ; in others it is only a mask to hide something unworthy. The infant public undergoes the completest mental subjection. It is dominated by the image, a prey to orgasm and nervous tension. There are an infinite number of things which are not taught in schools, and these things the child is most anxious to learn. In many of these things, the cinema is his best master. For example, how do grown-ups make love ? We who talk and think such a lot about the healthiness of the race today ought not to forget that the cinema is often turned into nothing else but a real stimulus of the generative instinct, and that in the most dangerous way through the cerebral nerves. The motion picture often enough resolves itself into a mental aphrodisiac for adults and children, with this grave disadvantage that the adult has a reasoned experience to oppose to evil suggestions, which is quite lacking in the child. I propose to transcribe here what I wrote recently in this connection in my book Sex Education (Educazione del Sesso) : " The adolescent does not yet know in its reality the joy of the woman's kiss or embrace, and the cinema does little more than show him, as inevitable part almost of every film, the musical vision of these kisses and embraces. One of the most tormenting ideas of the boy is the knowledge of woman's real nudity ; the ideal nudity of works of art being quite a different thing and incapable of satisfying him. The cinema spares no opportunity to offer him a photographic semi-nudity, which is often enough very near actual nudity. The instinct, half -satisfied, on the one hand in imagination, is exasperated, on the other, by the lack of a real satisfaction. Female nudities seen on the screen in acts of languid abandon and provocation return both in sleep and in the waking state to disturb the boy's imagination ....". What are we to say, moreover, when instead of a lad a mere child is taken to the pictures ? It is useless to object that the child is too small, does not understand, does not know. The child understands, knows, learns still more, and remains silent. If he does not know, he learns, because the atavistic instinct which is sleeping in him requires very little to awaken it, when it stirs up impulses and remembrances which no one has ever taught him. To this we may add that the cinema projects on the screen an artificial world, a world that is radically false, both in the logic by which circumstances are joined together, and in the sentiments which animate the characters, and also on account of the sympathetic light which is made to surround things and beings which and who are often far from being admirable. Bit by bit, the young person comes to believe that the actual reality of life is shaped in this fashion. In the matter too of love and the sentimental life which concerns him and of his possibilities of attaining it and living it, the cinema insinuates into the virgin mind of the youth, who is anxious to try things, a completely false conception detached from social reality which may lead him to commit in reality grown up people's follies. Even if the plot of the film does not contain anything immoral, it is nevertheless founded on incidents of an emotive character which keep the nervous system in a state of continuous tension. Let us consider for a moment the special delicacy of the undeveloped encephalic-spinal system of a young lad. This system is subjected to a strain to which we must add the impressionable nature due to the boy's age, the effect of remaining in a dark room, the music, the fatigue, the power of the excitant and the means of its employ and we cannot marvel if in all the so called cinematographic psychoses and neuroses which doctors have studied the erotic obsession always returns with a constant