The educational screen (c1922-c1956])

hne, 1923 The Theatrical Field 279 The Year's Best IT IS A sacred custom among reviewers to compile at the end of the year, a list of the ten "best" pictures. This is fully as important and necessary as the annual selection of the Ail-American football team. Robert Sherwood of "Life" feels so strongly about it, in fact, that he has been known to put eleven pictures on his list, so as to remain on an equal footing with Camp, Eckersall, et al. In order not to be remiss in the duties of a reviewer, or to overlook any of the privileges of the position, I have made my list likewise. And here it is: "Robin Hood." "Nanook of the North." "The Flirt." "Back Home and Broke." "The Pilgrim." "Oliver Twist." "The Dangerous Age." "Driven." "Toll of the Sea." "The Christian." It is not a brilliant list, with the exception of "Robin Hood," which stands as the cinema achievement of the year, but these pictures generally possess those quieter virtues that seem to be getting lost or disappearing entirely in the furious scramble after the bizarre and the obvious in present-day movies. Truth, it strikes me, is the outstanding characteristic of every one of them — and wholesomeness, which follows inevitably. "Back Home and Broke," for example, is on the list because of its thorough demonstration that a clean, live, humorous screen play does not necessarily depend upon guns or other weapons for its dramatic interest. Faults, of course, there may be — these are not perfect pictures, remember — but if you have seen them, you have seen some of the best the screen has to offer you. The Flickering Screen (Continued from page 261) which the skillful teacher will select the material most fitted to the needs of her class. Out of six fourth-grade rooms, no two teachers would probably take up the lesson on "Mountains" in the same way. If they did, teaching would be but a sorry mechanical routine, and all individuality would disappear. Last flicker. "Visual education is an exploded theory." This statement, occasionally heard by over-conservative teachers, is as ridiculous as false. It is not altogether a new thing. Back in 1658 Johann Amos Komensky started the movement, when he first introduced the use of illustrations in schoolbooks. Komensky, or Comenius, as we know him, faced even greater difficulties than the modern educator contends with. His life was one long struggle against ultraconservatism. Comenius had no moving pictures, no lantern slides, no stereoscopic views to help him. The art of photography was not to be born for two hundred years more. The use of an illustration of any sort, even the crude woodcuts of the day, in a schoolbook, was as radical an innovation as ever the use of the motion projector in the schoolroom would appear today. Comenius, however, faced the opposition of all the educational tradition of centuries, and drove home his point. Today he is acclaimed as one of the great educators of all time. It was as difficult then for him to work out the details of visual education for his day as it is for the modern educator to divert the film from a purely theatrical enterprise to serious work in the schoolroom. Comenius died 250 years ago. Yet as he succeeded beyond his dreams the modern educator has made but a beginning, and is standing on the threshold of a new vista, an inspired and of times faulty enthusiast, yet a dreamer whose visions have the promise of priceless fruit. (Concluded on page 293)