Film and Radio Guide (Oct 1945-Jun 1946)

March, 1 946 FILM AND RADIO GUIDE 49 CINEMA SYNDROME BY MAX J. HERZBERG Principal, Weequahic High School, Newark, New Jersey The sound film is the most stupendous and revolutionary educational invention since the invention of the printing press. When Edison began his experiments vcith this device, or combination of devices, in 1894, he was pointing the way toward a contrivance as time-saving and as energy-saving in education as the complicated structures of an automobile factory or a newspaper pressroom are in industry. But one would not think the sound film so momentous or important if one looked at our schools today, a full generation since this contrivance came into practical use. It is only haltingly and faultily that we have attempted to bring films to educational fulfilment. Vested interests, lethargy, but mainly ignorance and misunderstanding continue to stand in the way of such fruition all over the land. It is indeed a disease of education that films are still only a toy in our schools, still only an incidental and not an essential and indispensable procedure. What are the symptoms of this disease or, to abandon medicine for logic, what are the fallacies, the misconceptions which prevent a full realization of cinema values? Let me mention five causes of misunderstanding. 1. It is not clearly enough perceived that, as a semantic device, pictures speak louder than words. In this connection we need not dwell on the truism that sound pictures are merely part of a vast system of com Reprinted from "The English Journal," February, 1946. Max J. Herzberg munication devices which make possible what somewhat naively we choose to call civilization. Man’s scheme of living has developed through the ages as a consequence of the evolution of his power to communicate, from the limited space and time range of gestures and grunts to the tremendously rapid and farflung effectiveness of print, telegraphy, and radio. Nor need we dwell on the equally platitudinous fact that it is the business of language arts teachers to provide instruction in the skills of communication. From the time when motion pictures and radio first began their evolution as the most popular of modern folk arts, English teachers instinctively felt that it was particularly their business to deal with them. That instinctive feeling, in my judgment, arose from a realization on their part that these arts were fundamentally mediums of verbal communication a n d therefore within the province of the language arts. Some debate ensued regarding this question, yet apparently little doubt exists today that the cinema is as truly one of the language arts as is literature itself. But as communication and as a language the cinema performs a special and distinctive function. The admirable Harvard report on General Education in a Free Societij stated the point very well in its final section on new mediums of education. Speaking of films and television, the report said ; Something of a revolution is indeed taking' place through these ne'w means of bringing the world itself, and claiified versions of it, to us. Traditionally language deputizes for what has to be absent. It tells us what we might see or hear. But too often it gets in the way of, or replaces, all that could give it a meaning. ... Now that the things and events themselves can be brought to us, the role of language is reversed. Instead of words having to explain or represent things, it is rather things, and actual processes taking place before us, which explain words or call them in question. In the making of a good instructional or documentary film the duties of language are searchingly looked into, and the needless obscurities of traditional texts are exposed. A healthy criticism is started, and language, gaining a rival in its new i^artner, has new standards of lucidity to live up to. This sound doctrine of the Harvard report may perhaps be supplemented in the minds of teachers by the reflection that, after all, many of our alphabets and our words originated in pictographs and in onomatopoeia, remote ancestors of the film and the sound track. 2. Because of another misun