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in the mind's eye, the pleasure conferred by the purely pictorial — these are often quite incidental effects, although for the class in question they are effects that can be easily enhanced by instruction and guidance.
This brings us to the special functions of cultural organisers, namely, their duty in respect of cinematography and the duty towards their members to be discharged through cinematography. All enquiries into the really permanent impressions left on spectators by a film lead to the conclusion that the attention is seized and held according as the spectator is made to sympathise and identify himself with a particular scene or reel or even with the film as a whole. Reminders of personal experience, of things read, seen, thought about or even dreamt of, and fellow-feeling with the figures on the screen, granted these are true to life, touch us all very closely. We surrender ourselves, for as long as we find the experience true, that is, possible. Criticism, even by an unsophisticated public, begins as soon as the treatment becomes inherently false and the characters act like automata. The cinema has already performed one unforgettable service; it has taught people. The hissing of rotten films by uncultivated people is more eloquent thar> critical paragraphs.
Bela Balasz once said that the cinema made people visible. This power to make us perceive things and persons — not only on the screen but also perhaps in life — not as they should be, but as they are — — is the quality which we edircationists should cultivate above all others. Here school education and popular culture outside the school join hands, the task of both being to bring their disciples to grips with realities.
Nowadays, when men, individually and collectively, in groups and even whole classes, are seeking a tefuge from life in a misty neo-romanticism, artificially destroying the.r sense of realities in literature, pictorial art, music and conversation, gropingly exploring an uncomprehended past and an unknown future, dabbling in the occult and other forms of mental confusion — it is all the more impoitant that the recreational cinema should help us in our work of indicating the propei way to regard the world about us. What is wanted of the educationist is careful guidance, unhampered by too much moralising, and in this work recreational films, true to life and in close touch with realities, are an absolutely indispensable aid.
Not that our efforts must be confined to mere projection, as so many suppose. Exhibition must be followed by analysis, discussion and exchange of views within smaller groups. Just to show films and nothing more argues a very imperfect understanding of the cinema's possibilities.
The great service of films is that they are looked at. The viewing of a film affords concrete impressions, ideas or conceptions. It has always been a fact that visualisation has facilitated plastic or concrete thought, especially in minds incapable of, or not yet trained for, abstract thinking. When people have shared a common experience, seen and grasped something,