The motion picture industry (1933)

374 ^> ^> -o> The Motion Picture Industry because of the small fraction of the public who are weak-minded or vicious it would distort or mutilate a great popular form of expression which can safely be left to the great majority of virile, wholesome people, young and old, of normal reactions; and in the opinion of this Conference it is spiritually weakening to the healthy majority to attempt to protect them by concealment of those things which are deleterious only to society's sick few. (6) It has often resulted in the mangling or destruction of that which is essentially wholesome rather than unwholesome, because it has failed consistently to grasp the real causes of psychological reaction to what the eye sees, and has often confused what may be a stimulus to good with what may be a stimulus to bad — in other words, it has failed, and always will fail, since it is whimsical rather than thoughtful and scientific — to apprehend the psychological laws of suggestion. (7) It has gone on the assumption — largely because the very justification of legal censorship rests on that assumption — that there is continuously running through motion pictures an element of the vicious, whereas, in the opinion of groups who have studied the great proportion of motion pictures over a long period of time, this element can be said to exist but sporadically and can be discovered as in nowise inherent in the medium itself. (8) It has failed to recognize, and dare not recognize, because it is based on the theory that there are final, unchanging universal standards of good and evil and of good and evil influences, that fundamental in the whole question of the motion picture is a legitimate and inevitable difference of opinion between sections, communities, groups and individuals of equal intelligence and moral integrity; and has sought to define, often with lamentable discrepancy in the actions of different legal censorship boards upon the same given picture, interpretations and opinions to apply arbitrarily to all minds and all tastes — interpretations and opinions that are nothing but the individual pronouncements of the censors themselves, arising out of their own feelings and notions. (9) It has tended, through fear, on the part of screen writers, artists, and creators, of its arbitrary dictums and misconceptions, to pervert rather than to benefit the nature of the motion picture; it has created a state of mind in these individuals that has often resulted in the befuddling and corruption in narration on the screen of what has gone not only unchallenged but approved in literature and on the stage ; it has been a powerful aid in the distortion of even the best literature and drama transferred to the screen and in the distortion of life that legitimately has a place on the screen, and should have a place there, if motion pictures are to become an art, albeit a popular