The film daily year book of motion pictures (1947)

school market has been comparatively slow and distribution facilities have been uncertain. Projector manufacturers have been frustrated in their attempts to apply mass production techniques to I6mm projector development in the face of prevailing uncertain school and college market. In short, the problem is one of producing more good pictures so that more good prints will be available so that more projectors will be purchased so that more pictures can be produced, and so on. The problem, of course, has been one of the chicken and the egg— an identical problem confronting the television industry. There is a great deal if evidence at the present time that may be interpreted to indicate that this triangular bottleneck may be alleviated during the next five years. Githens sees indications leading to the belief that the 20,000 school-owned projectors of 1945 may be supplemented by at least that many more by the middle of 1947 and that there may likely be four or five times that number by 1949. At the same time, community organizations all over the country have become aware of the motion picture as an adult teaching and information device and the number of community-owned projectors is increasing comparatively rapidly. For some idea of the present stature of visual education, consider this: For a 12month period in Iowa alone, there was a total attendance of 3,500,000 at 19,000 separate showings of films obtained from the University of Iowa visual instruction bureau. The aggregate audience embraced pupils from 475 of Iowa's school systems, or more than half of the state's school-age children. The University of Iowa's bureau, incidentally, has come a long way since the World War I days when it distributed lantern slides and was one of the three visual instruction services in the country. Today, it produces its own color and sound films, and has built up a library of some 2,000 titles and 3,500 prints. For the bureau, the University has earmarked a $250,000 unit of its new communications center for the expanding program in audio-visual instruction. ESTIMATES of the total number of projectors at the disposal of schools and adult groups today vary. A favored estimate of 40,000 to 50,000 is that of Frank Arlinghaus of Modern Talking Picture Service, who also predicts that, within the foreseeable future, 300,000 halls and 274,000 churches gradually will become equipped to show non-theatrical films. This impetus in potential in the consumer market, together with the success of the motion picture as an instrument for training in the Armed forces, has brought about the establishment of a large number of production organizations bent upon producing high quality instructional films. Simultaneously colleges and universities, recogniz ing the need for teacher training in the use of visual aids, have entered into research on the subject and have increased the number of classes in the uss of visual aids. Certain states have taken steps to require all beginning teachers to equip themselves through study and research for the proper use of classroom motion pictures and other visual aids. Other indications that the ultimate consumer expects to receive and to use more and better films can be seen in numerous research projects involving the co-operative efforts of production and education in attempting to clarify questions of content, format and technique that have arisen from time to time in the production and use of instructional pictures. In the opinion of C. Scott Fletcher, president of Encyclopaedia Britannica Films, owned by the University of Chicago and, at the writing, the largest American producer of classroom pictures, there were these two outstanding factors in the 1946 educational sound films boom: The return to production of sound projectors, and the widening knowledge of the tremendously effective role of sound films training in the armed forces during World War II. Both are expected to play a large role in the 1947 history of sound films dissemination. But in 1947, as in 1946, the "bottleneck" of the industry will probably be the projector problem, Fletcher declares. Curtailed entirely during the war, the manufacture of 16mm. sound projectors is now heading back towards normal. But at war's end only about one school out of 30 in the United States had even one sound projector, the prerequisite to an audio-visual education program. As educational films producers now view the problem, the greatest prospect of help coming to audio-visual education is the production and wide distribution of a simplified, light weight projector. Projector manufacturers are working on this problem, and the industry is in high hopes that a less expensive light-weight 16mm. projector, that can be easily loaded and used, will be on the market in the near future. During the past year Encyclopaedia Britannica Films produced 24 new 16mm. classroom motion pictures, stepping up its warcurtailed annual production schedule 100 per cent by 12 films. In 1947 E.B. Films plans to produce nearly 40 new classroom motion pictures. E.B.F. sales in 1946 surpassed all previous years, and the experience of other major producers was similar. Highlights of the teaching film year range from inauguration by Metro of an educational 16mm. program overseas to the entry into the field of the publishing house of McGraw-Hill via a series of Text-Films shorts and slidefilms to correlate with widely used McGraw-Hill textbooks. The films, which the pulilishing house will release in the 735