International Review of Educational Cinematography (Jan-Dec 1932)

787 — It is not absolutely certain that the French philosopher and pedagogue Edouard Claparede is right when he maintains that spontaneous attention on the part of students produces an increased clarity of impressions. I should be very glad if this view could be proved to be correct. Arguing from the point of view that one learns with greater ease when the attention is intense and has nothing to distract it, may people prefer individual teaching, urging that the link between the teacher and the pupil should be so intimate that nothing should be allowed to interrupt it. This may be true, and we should in connection with this draw the reader's attention to a very special advantage of the cinema teaching method which anyone can establish for himself by going into a darkened cinema hall and seeing a projection. Unconsciously the film will seem to be directed to him alone personally, whence we may take it for granted that the intensity of the public's attention in a cinema is greater than in a theatre, where the words cannot always be perfectly heard and where therefore the conscious activity of the brain undergoes a heavier strain. Our method must then take advantage of this particularity of the cinema, this impression that the film is addressing itself to each individual person as in a private lesson. The feeling of being part of a group is not lost however, in a darkened hall which is occasionally illuminated. This feeling shows itself in the more important passages of the film by means of laughter, applause and even cries of disapproval . The cinema where the film creates at one and the same time the feeling of isolation and the sense of forming part of a group can in our case possess all the advantages of both private and group teaching. This kind of teaching is not comparable with that given to a class or course for adults. In this former type of teaching there could appear phenomena of collective psychology and not crowd psychology. Subtle and not easily perceptible sentiments which disappear in a room even badly lighted. What type of film is it proposed to use in our teaching method ? Chiefly animated drawing films which have a place already in the story of teaching. Commandon, one of the leaders of the French cinema movement, claims to have been one of the first to utilize animated drawings in the field of pedagogy. Many reasons militate in favour of the use of the animated drawing film, several of which are of a material and practical order. Konrad Walter, who has translated into German, modifying certain passages, the book by the American F. G. Lutz on the animated drawing film, says that this type of film can be made with relatively simple technical means. He points out also that the length of a comic film, that is 150 metres, can be obtained with 8000 photograms, which as they only differ one from another in part only require some hundreds of drawings, which would appreciably reduce the cost of the film. The talking animated drawing film costs nevertheless more, even if no special devices are used. In order that the method may not rapidly lose its value, the films must not be used as a cheap suppplement to any ordinary cinema programme but should form part of the principal item. (See chapter on Publicity and Organization of Teaching). Not only reasons of a material and practical order, however, counsel the use of animated drawings. In his book " Le Cinema'et l'ecole ", Ernest Savary says : " The film produces a livelier reaction than either the teacher's word or the sight of a book, or a theatre, or the reading of a romance, because it requires but a minimum of effort