We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
THE CINEMA AND SOCIETY
THE CINEMA AND OTHER FORMS OF ENTERTAINMENT
A great deal of hot air has been blown over the cinema by the social reformers and other amateur censors who enjoy a good puff at a sitting target. The fact that they are now turning away to direct their distended cheeks at television brings a momentary relief to the movies.
The cinema is one, and only one, element in the world around us which brings some measure of influence to bear on our attitude to life. On many people it has no influence whatsoever they never see a film in a cinema. Formerly this section tended to be the professional and administrative class, the busy people leading preoccupied lives who left such tomfoolery as films to the lower orders and to silly adolescents. Nowadays cinema-going permeates all classes of society, and the habit of seeing films with some regularity has been established in youth for people who are now in middle life. Constant patronage by older people is beginning to have its effect, and make it more possible for films with a maturer kind of story and treatment to gain wider audiences.
The cinema should be judged in perspective, alongside the other forms of entertainment which the twentieth century has to offer. Commercialized entertainment exists now on a scale for which there is no comparison in the past. This, and not the cinema alone, forms the revolution in human communications which is surely one of the most challenging developments of our time. The linotype machine pours out printed matter at a rate which destroys many square miles of forests each day. Some four thousand bound novels are published each year. The radio provides in this country alone some forty hours of entertainment and information every day. In New York there are about one hundred hours of televised entertainment every day. Theatres
216