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94 THE DEVIL'S CAMERA
Thus one country, America, gives the people of a second country, England, and, of course, other countries throughout the world, an entirely false and libellous idea of a third country, China. How can such a state of things help the cause of World Peace?
Almost without exception every country suffers at the hands of the film producers. The wrong characteristics are brought out. The good points are hidden and the bad ones thrust to the front. Hollywood producers seem to take a fiendish delight in viciously ridiculing the customs of the country in which their theme is laid, misinterpreting its ways, and discrediting its creeds and beliefs.
Under such conditions it is absurd to expect the nations to understand one another. Most of us still hold that ' seeing is believing,' and the public cannot be blamed for colouring its judgement of other countries with the impression gained from their portrayal on the screen.
Misrepresentation is one of the many evils for which the cinema is directly to blame. It can offer no valid defence, nor even plead artistic licence, for truth is not only stranger than fiction but far more interesting, and the cinema would be rated much higher if it gave accurate representations of world conditions and customs, instead of the present tissues of fiction which muddle the minds of millions of cinema-goers and are the cause of endless misunderstandings in every corner of the globe.
All these charges are unanswerable. Go and see practically any American picture which has its story laid in a foreign country and you will need no further proof. Yet Hollywood protests with an obstinacy which illustrates yet again by what type of mind it is controlled, that it is furthering the cause of World Peace.
In an address at a National Conference on Motion Pictures, held in New York, Colonel F. L. Herron, the manager of the foreign department of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, said :