International Review of Educational Cinematography (Jan-Dec 1930)

— 44 — power to discriminate. Thus the youth whose mind has been trained from childhood by methods of teaching consonant with his disposition and his physicopsychological capacities, will be able to hold his own, unmolested or but little hurt, against the manifold dangers and temptations that beset his senses and his soul during the evolutionary stages of his career. In any case, the Rome Institute is studying both aspects of the question with the greatest attention and will publish month by month the results of the enquiry it is carrying out, in preparation for the definite views and proposals it intends to formulate on the didactic and social contribution of the screen to childrens' education. The didactic aspects of the cinema are clearly delimited. We are here concerned mainly with a knowledge of the different systems of visual instruction practised in the several countries and with discovering their remote origins — a point of great historical and pedagogical interest ; examining the possibilities offered by the screen as a means of replacing or completing oral instruction ; determining to what branches of learning it lends itself most successfully ; in what practical manner it can most efficaciously be used as an instrument of instruction, and hence the technical points to be observed in the production of teaching films — projection apparatus and conditions of exhibition — (halls, length of films, lighting, and so forth) and whether and to what extent the latest inventions of cinematographic science (sound films, talking films, colour and stereoscopic films) may be utilized for teaching purposes. On the other hand, the study of social questions involves a whole series of enquiries, to which there is practically no limitation; from an enquiry into the possibilities of the employment of children in cinemas (especially in connection with the advantages of creating special cinemas and films for children) to a general enquiry into the direct and indirect influence that the screen may exercise not only on children's health (eyesight, effects of close atmosphere, etc.), but on their mental development and their immediate and future tendencies. It is in fact bound up with the whole study of pediatrics, psychology, psychiatry and criminology. Thus it behoves us to examine whether the cinema, which to-day offers the greatest of all attractions to children, is under present conditions a blessing or an evil, a help or a disturbing factor in their lives, and what steps ought to be taken for the revision of films suited to children (apart from purely didactic films), so as to render them of real educational value in social life. But the social problems of the cinema, which offer such unlimited scope for study that they cannot even be enumerated here, are by no means confined to the young alone. In a certain sense it may be said that the cinema, both in its technique and in its capacity for specialized training, is a social problem in itself. It is in close contact with the problems of hygiene, social welfare, trade risks, farm life, and labour in its dual aspect of vocational orientation and rationalizationIt is in direct touch also with the legislative domain, owing to the uses to which the film can be put for the ends of justice and as a means of re-educating prisoners and children in reformatories, etc. It has contact even with the field of publicity,