The Film Daily (1947)

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LoomNG towurd lomoiiiioiij By ERIC JOHNSTON President, Motion Picture Association 1 BELIEVE that significant advances in the motion pictuie "world of tomorrow" will be in the field of \ isual education— in an increasingly wide employment of the film as a tool for teaching in school classrooms and in organized educational groups outside of schools. The motion picture will never supplant the traditional teaching team of text and teacher; nor is the primary function of the theatrical motion picture — to entertain — in any way going to be impaired by its wider use in education. But each will help the other. Education has discovered that Hollywood's rich storehouse of the dramatic art is like a fabulous mine which produces not one precious metal, but two. It has discovered that the entertainment film— the full-length feature photoplay and the short subject— often contain highly important residual educational values. And I am confident that a wider use of motion pictures as teaching tools will increase the stature and popularity of the screen. ■^ -A ^ TEACHING FILMS had been used for a long time when I came into the Association, but in .September 1946 we determined to point up our educational activities in more positive fashion. We established in the Association a fullscale Department of Educational Services, adequately and competently staffed, to meet this broad objective: To serve as a connecting link between the needs of education and the facilities of the motion picture industry. We have extended invitations to national groups of specialists in education, for instance, to tell us what they need in the way f)f teaching films, and we work with them to try to obtain it. One of the important projects in the edu cational j^rogram is the library of teaching films under the supervision of Teaching Film Custodians, Inc., an Association-sponsored, non-profit distributing organization. This library today contains some 600 titles and it is constantly growing. These films are a\ailable at modest rentals to schools, and to non-school groups which have established educational programs, through more than 500 film libraries maintained at state universities, colleges, city and county boards of education, the Y.M.C.A., and, in some cities, public libraries. Nearly 20,000 prints of these 600 titles are in circulation, and many schools, by long-term leases, have their own film libraries—an ideal circumstance, because teachers are thereby able to use a particular film at the precise moment it is most useful as supplementary to the text and course of study. -^ ^ -^ THE STORY of the teaching film is an amazing one, in my opinion, and well illustrated by the accomplishments in the field of English literature. The Association made available to teachers of English a long list of feature-length photoplays based on classic books. State university libraries submitted this list to many hundreds of English teachers throughout the country to express their preferences. Among features thus suggested were "Huckleberry Finn," "Jane Eyre," "The House of Seven Gables," and "David Copperfield"— to name only four out of a number finally chosen. But the significance of the project lay in the fact that the films selected met a list of rigid requirements on the part of the English teachers and then lent themselves to cutting to classroom length without losing either the required facets or destroying the "sparkle" necessary to hold interest. The English teachers, naturally, wanted only films which told the complete stories of the books on which they were based; which did not involve adaptations from the original texts; which included all the principal characters, and which accurately visualized the setting of familiar quotations. I believe it is a striking tribute to Hollywood that so manv films met these tests and a second striking tribute lies in the fact that they were cut to the pattern desired without losing their educational values. Such "excerpted" films from full-length photoplays— covering a wide variety of subjects in addition to English, of courseconstitute only a portion of the teaching film library. The rest of it is composed of short subjects, made originally for regular theater audiences, but entirely suitable to classroom use without changing them in any way. What happened was this: these short subjects, which had been produced for entertainment, put on caps and gowns and turned teacher in the classrooms. Specific cases in point are "The Story of Dr. Carver," and "The Man Who Changed the World," which tells the story of the invention of the spinning jenny. Through the Association, the motion picture industry also has been generous in supporting research and development in the teaching film field. Anything over and above actual handling and distribution costs which accrues from rental fees for TEC pictures is "plowed back" in the field of education research. In addition, direct appropriations have been made by the Association for research into education film production techniques; into testing the usefulness of the teaching film, and into experimentations with new types of teaching films. Leading American educators are lending magnificent contributions to these Association efforts. lir iV 1^ VE MERELY SKETCHED some of the things we are doing and planning to assist education. I think they are substantial contributions. I think, too, they are concrete expressions of the motion picture industry's recognition of its social responsibilities in our democracy. Democracy needs an informed, enlightened, alert citizenry. It cannot survive without such a citizenry. What we do, therefore, to help education will help democracy. And what helps democracy helps our industry, which owes its growth to the freedoms which it has enjoyed under our democratic form of government. Wednesday. Se|nemher 10, 1947 A Section of THE FILM DAILY — Pictures of Tomorrow and Directors' Number