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.
classifications of subjects which call for revision or actual rejection. The lists of subjects drawn up thus serve merely for the purposes of general guidance, and the Board considers each particular case on its merits in the light of general principles and precedent in respect of films of a like nature. It is obvious that, however simple the plot of a film may be, it may be unsuitable for exhibition on account of some particular part played in it.
As a general principle, no film is passed which is considered likely to be injurious to morality or to encourage or incite to crime or vice, or to be offensive to public feeling or to the respect due from the public to all nations.
A demur has been raised against the efficacy of these general principles. It is objected that a large proportion of the subjects dealt with are drawn from books and that if exception has not been taken to a given theme dealt with in a printed book, there is no reason why it should not be dealt with visually, i. e. shown on the screen. This objection is very properly answered by the contention that there is an essential difference between the book and the screen in their possibilities of penetration, understanding, and influence on the mind of the public. The first reaches a limited number of readers, while there is no limitation to the number of spectators ; moreover the film exercises its ascendency on whole crowds at a time, which is not the case with the written book. The reading of a book demands a certain mental effort, an effort of some considerable duration, before the message it conveys synthesizes, so to speak, and takes hold of the reader's mind. The film acts almost instantaneously and demands little or no effort ; it is not fatiguing and does its work of suggestion or propaganda, whether for good or evil, in the briefest space of time, so that the synthetic purport of the plot or theme is rapid, precise and striking in its details and its ensemble.
Lastly, the manner in which books react on the emotions, and the reader's apprehension of its sordid or dangerous elements are purely intuitive, central and proportionate to his psychological and cultural development. The film acts through the sight, through the senses ; and relies on no internal mechanism to be taken in and realized in all its details. The psychic process of transmission to the understanding that takes place when reading is outstripped by the immediacy of vision.
It is moreover contended — and this is a point which the British Board has taken into proper consideration — that a single film, considered by itself and isolated from its surroundings, has no great suggestive influence. Its ascendency works by degrees, by geometrical rather than mathematical increase, according to frequency, that is to say the possibility of repetition ; while this is not the case with books, owing to the time and fatigue involved by reading.
464