International Review of Educational Cinematography (Jan-Dec 1931)

Record Details:

Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




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.

— 172 — me at the age of 15. What I saw made me cry and I couldn't sleep at night. I felt so depressed that I would gladly never have gone again. However.." This " however " is a sad confession of how we are all slaves to habit and blindly follow whithersoever it may lead us. 4. Often, too, the cinema provokes forms of nerve-strain, which are translated into states of depression and, in persons who by reason of age, dependency on others or lack of critical sense are unable to choose the films they would prefer, lead to loss of appetite, insomnia and frequently listlessness at work. According to the statements of two or three boys, this nervous strain takes the form of mental pain, experienced not only at home and at nighttime, but even during projection and at the most exciting moments. This occurs more particularly when the film is one that demands very close attention. 5. Moral fatigue is caused by other classes of films, films which are the special battle-ground of those who would protect the welfare of children and young people and of those who deny that the screen can do any moral harm to anybody. The first of such classes is immoral or vulgar films. Not many of the answers refer to these, in fact, scarcely one-fifth of those which complain of moral fatigue. We may quote textually from a few of the more significant among these references: "When the film is unpleasant or disgusts "; " You often see films unsuited for children and demoralising "; "Commoner than fatigue is moral disgust, since many films are immoral and often positively indecent "■; " When the films are of low moral value or are too erotic "; " if the film contains something that disgusts "; " Films which depress by their utter vulgarity. How can actors and directors take part in such stuff? "; " Low vulgar films ". The above references are separate from those which in general terms reproach certain films as being immoral or suggestive. As already mentioned, replies in this strain are few, although a number of them are couched in strong and categorical terms. Also the bulk of them emanate from small localities and not from the larger cities. It has already been pointed out that police vigilance is doubtless more effective in the big cities so that the authorities can the more easily intervene to forbid or restrict performances which shock the public conscience. Another fact deserving of notice in this connection is that the censor's permit carries with it no time-limit, so that a censored film can be shown once, twice or a hundred times in large or small centres until the material is worn out. In small centres, especially, where the minds and morals of the young need added protection, films are constantly shown that are technically, artistically and morally out of date. Nearly all are films which the city cinema would reject as having no longer any appeal, but which