Reel and Slide (Mar-Dec 1918)

REEL and SLIDE in preserving the morale of men in uniform during their leisure hours. But first it must be known from persons who understand the churches, both in the cities and small towns or rural districts, in the North and the South, what kinds of pictures the churches want for inspiration and moral suggestion on Sunday, and what they desire for more secular week-day entertainments. A continuous selection must be made from all the pictures as they are produced and put in circulation by the various film manufacturing companies. Lists of these selections should be published regularly for the use of ministers and other church workers. They must carry some technical facts about the number of reels and the company making them, and they should also contain some sentences under each picture which will permit individual church workers to know in advance the character of the pictures and the possibility of use for certain purposes. It should be made clear what selected motion pictures can and cannot do for a church. At their best, they can only draw an audience and teach a moral lesson; they must always be regarded as a means to an end. They offer an opportunity for ministers and other church workers to become acquainted with people so that personal religious work as well as the more definite social work of the church can be accomplished. Novels and the Films FOR two hundred years the novel has posed as the guiding philosopher and entertaining friend of the reading world. De Foe's stern realism in the art of telling tales has been succeeded by every other "ism" that could borrow a name, until we are now told that humanism is the final goal in the fiction writer's field. Whatever humanism may mean in the mind of the writer who uses the term, less enlightened ones can only study human life as it translates itself into action. Only so far as the novel deals with concrete action do its characters become real. When the "Wizard of the North" mixes too much scenery and costume with the story, the reader skips or quits. If Dickens drops from sentiment to wordy drivel, pages are turned to the next chapter. It is what the people in those pages did that counts. The novel loves itself as a picture of the manners and customs and costumes of its time of action. Yet just as many Jeanie Deans and Pickwicks and Auld Reekies and White Hart inns exist as there are readers of the novels that contain them — no two alike and each different from the author's conception. However clear the author's descriptions may be, places become unreal and shadowy, and persons flit through them like unlaid ghosts as events move toward the story's climax. What happens is what counts. Nobly as it has tried for these two hundred years, the novel has failed to reach the democracy of the ever growing reading world. The best novels have been written for the aristocracy of that world — notably the authors themselves. Books about novels have been written in as large number as the novels themselves, only to prove what one man thinks about them and why they ought to be read. Fiction has climbed the heights of moral and mental philosophy, delved into political economy, gathered wisdom from bitter suffering and painful discipline in social and industrial life, only to leave the vast majority of its readers groping unsatisfied after a vague something they feel but do not understand. They do not "see" the story. Strange to say, it is the novelists themselves and those who write about them who, in glorifying their own work, have shown where it has failed, yet do not realize that for the failure there is no remedy. One of the most philosophical of critics, Wilson FoUett, recently wrote of Galsworthy's novels that^^they are a series of apparently disconnected Episodes strung like rare pearls of equal size and luster in a complete necklace. Comes another writer about books to remark that until about ten years ago no man ever lived who could tell another man a story. For, he says, a novel is nothing but an elaborate moving-picture scenario, and the reader's mind is the studio where that scenario is produced. Just so. John Galsworthy has gone as near to real life as the written word can get. His novels nearly follow scenario methods in their construction. But his scenarios don't produce well in the studio of the democratic reader's mind. If that studio does not happen to be equipped with English scenes and manners and customs it has to produce them inadequately and tiresomely out of nothing. Nothing out of nothing makes not a little bit. The one and one of the two criticisms, however, mean many more than two. They mean, among other things, that the moving picture has begun where the limitations of the written word compelled the novel to leave off. More, it has succeeded just where the novel failed, in every phase of life it has pictured, has conveyed to every mind the vital meaning of its message. No long descriptions are needed, no sermons ; there can be no misunderstandings. Clean-cut, complete, every other imagination of form or feature, scenery or surroundings than' its own altogether shut out, there is the story on the screen, action unbroken, interpreting itself. It does what the novel has failed to do. The reader's mind is filled with the doings of living, breathing, moving people and he begins to be — a humanist. The Lure WHAT normal man can resist the chance to witness a movie show in his private office? What housewife can resist an offer to screen a picture in her parlor; and what matters it what the show may be? The mere fact that it can be done is argument enough to permit it being done. The hidden mysteries of the moving picture world permeate its every branch and not less in that one which has to do with the commonplace commercial activities of men. The desire to go "back of the scenes," inherent in every human being, is akin to the appeal of the films in the intimacy of parlor or office. Thus, the salesman with a projector is thrice welcome. Government Slides NOT an unimportant part of the Creel Bureau's work is being accomplished by means of lantern slides. No publicity shop would be complete without the stereopticon. A Department of Lantern Slides is now in fruitful operation from Washington and the widespread exhibition of these war work sets is encouraged by the Committee on Public Information. The slides are offered at nominal price to all stereopticon owners.