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.
— i6g — ■
" The mind continues to be occupied by what the eyes have seen, and your head begins to go round ".
" Fatigue is often due to the complicated plot and, in serial films more particularly, to the effort to foresee what is coming ".
" Sometimes films deal with scientific problems; this means an added cerebral effort resulting in mental fatigue ".
In other cases mental or cerebral fatigue is attributed to the fact of having visited the cinema after hard work at home or at school or to the presence of extraneous elements in addition to the subject-matter of the film. Some again refer to a form of fatigue due to irritating, unsuitable or over-loud musical accompaniment.
* * *
Essentially, the complaints made by child cinema-goers are of two kinds. Either they refer to the environment (bad air, etc.), in which case they can very easily be met by the modification or strict enforcement of the police regulations governing the control of public entertainments or they are essentially subjective in that they refer to the length and character of cinema performances.
Cerebral fatigue may quite logically ensue not from the length of the various parts of a film but from the varying degree of interest aroused in the spectator. The attitude towards a work of art necessarily depends upon the psychology of the individual who is reacting to it. Nothing, especially in this class of phenomena, is absolute or axiomatic. Hence the difficulty of creating among the whole body of spectators a single state of mind capable of realising the beauty or the ugliness, the value or worthlessness of a representation.
No doubt it is better as a rule that films for children and young people should preserve a sense of proportion and that their plots should not be too complicated, but light and easy, adapted to a growing mind. The dramatic, the comic and the educational should be well mixed and free of psychological complications.
This brings us back once more to a problem frequently discussed in the pages of our Review and already touched upon in connection with bodily fatigue — namely, the question of the age of admission, the determination of special categories of persons and performances or the creation of a cinema reserved exclusively for children and young people.
IV. Moral fatigue.
One of the major and more delicate problems of the cinema in its relation to the young is concerned with what is referred to as " moral " fatigue, that is, forms of mental depression that are sometimes induced by