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the cinema as a means of recreation and less disposed to acknowledge its intrinsic merits.
" Its utility is relative. A boy who on completion of his school duties regularly goes and shuts himself up for two hours or more in a cinema theatre, goes home with tired eyes and a tired mind ".
" The cinema as an entertainment is not of great utility, is often very injurious and only rarely beneficial to the training of character ".
" Considered as mere entertainment, the cinema does not achieve its purpose. To be healthy, amusement must be physically stimulating. A cinema show, on the other hand, although it may amuse, produces in the spectator, especially in children and delicate persons, a sense of fatigue and nervous excitement ".
" We cannot deny the entertainment film all utility, if the interest and astonishment it arouses and the mental pleasure it evokes counterbalance the natural fatigue it induces. In my opinion, however, 70 % of children prefer a walk in the country, with mind and limbs unfettered, to a cinema show. The mere act of sitting for two or three hours in an uncomfortable seat, condemned to semi-immobility and with attention constantly fixed is itself no small sacrifice ".
" The theatrical cinema is not to be recommended for children, since its programmes rarely have in view the training and education of the young. Moreover, a child's mind is more impressed by things seen than by things heard, which greatly adds to the dangers of the theatre ".
" The cinema can never be considered a means of entertainment pure and simple while it continues to represent scenes of violence and crime and to depict the erotic, the immoral and the nude ".
" The entertainment cinema may be of utility, provided the performance is short. The strain of following a projection lasting longer than an hour is bad for children's health. It is further desirable that performances should be in the open air or that rooms should be rationally ventilated ".
" The cinema as an entertainment owes its popularity to its cheapness as compared with the theatre. With the growth of popular education, however, it will gradually lose ground in favour of a cinema devoted to scientific, cultural and educational ends ".
In this group of unfavourable or qualified replies the main preoccupation is the fear of the nervous excitement induced by films in impressionable minds and in the minds of the very young. Small children have not the adolescent's powers of perception and differentiation; they lack even the beginnings of a critical sense and are therefore doubly exposed to the dangers of possible film reactions.
One teacher recommends sport as a corrective, open air life, walks, exercise that does not condemn the child to sitting still under fatiguing conditions. He says that 70 % of children prefer these forms of recreation, but the crowds of children in front of our cinema-doors, the hours they spend inside watching a film sometimes over and over again would hardly seem to confirm this view.