International Review of Educational Cinematography (Jan-Dec 1931)

— 452 — re-enacted in life a dramatic scene from a film. By a miracle no one was killed, but the boys were sentenced to a term of imprisonment for highway robbery and attempted murder." " The normal film of drama and passion presents children and the uneducated with imaginary acts to which is lent the appearance of reality. Spectacles of this sort may not only lead to crime, but engender all kinds of nervous diseases and physiological disturbances. At school children who are assiduous cinema-goers become excitable, rebellious to authority, inattentive to their lessons; they crave for new emotional experience and are the most easily led astray. Often their imitative instinct prompts them to repeat some evil deed seen in a film. As things are, two measures would seem necessary: (i) to forbid children access to public cinemas at any rate in the evenings and when variety items are included in the programme; (2) a strict pre-censorship of films not by theorists or artists, but by parents." " Undoubtedly, for those who have a natural predisposition towards crime or who are habitual or occasional delinquents. We all know the sad case of three children who not long ago faithfully reenacted a scene from a film by killing a small-playmate, dragging him along by the feet and hanging him upon a tree. Such cases, however, are quite exceptional and limited to subjects with an hereditary taint or a predisposition to crime." " At Venice a child of good family stole a shoe from a shoeshop. When called to account, he said that he had only done what he had seen in a film the day before." " Films, especially those of a few years back, constitute for boys an excellent school of criminal technique, while many girls learn to regard life as a romantic and adventurous dream instead of a sacred trust. The uncommented (short explanatory captions do not count) representation of acts, gestures, morbid emotions have such a strong effect upon the children as they watch in the dark silence of the theatre that they become as it were obsessed When they are alone, and especially at night, they live the drama over again in their heated imaginations, identify themselves with the actors that especially appeal to them and thus unconsciously acquire experience of evil." . ,-> " If the cinema is a source of evil, the fault is entirely with mothers. The cinema plays the same part in the child's life as books. Nevertheless, mothers, who exercise strict supervision over their children's reading, calmly take them to cinema performances far more harmful than an immoral book, since an idea which the written word only dimly suggests acquires on the screen material substance and impresses itself upon the memory as an attractive picture. At an age when conscience is still undeveloped and the child is therefore unable to distinguish clearly between right and wrong, such impressions are indelible. If therefore care is taken to see that children are set good examples in the family circle and in their reading, it is only logical to see that the good effects of this educatio'n are not destroyed by undesirable entertainments. The young people do not know what life is; the theatrical film of to-day engenders wrong ideas, falsifies values and ends by suggesting that life is a giddy, brilliant and attractive show instead of the humble and modest round of toil and sacrifice which is the lot of most families." A few teachers doubt whether the cinema can be regarded as an element of immorality and crime, but they admit the possibility in particular cases, the cases, for example, of children and adolescents already handicapped by psychical defects and in whom the cinema may therefore encourage the development of latent instincts that only await a suitable opportunity to reveal themselves. We will quote two examples of this view: