International Review of Educational Cinematography (Jan-Dec 1934)

354 EDUCATIONAL CINEMATOGRAPHY which no school can ever set on one side, however technically or socially powerful may be the means placed at its disposal. What is important from the didactic and educational point of view is the greater or less wealth of content, that is the greater or smaller number of contacts with reality, the greater or less quantity of culture which one or another teaching method can offer the school, and still more especially the way in which it can render the spirit active and assist in its integral and normal development. The cinema when considered in its scholastic applications should be regarded from these points of view, and especially from the last mentioned point of view. To be sure, there is a by no means negligible importance for the first of the foregoing considerations to be drawn from the fact that, independently of the grade and the way in which the film engages and develops the subject's faculties, a determined means, if applicable to the school, has an educational value of its own when it has become a universally diffused instrument of social life. The school, taking it up and using it, carries out a work of adaptation to surroundings, and puts itself in union with society, which is to say that it proposes to reach within certain limits and in a given way, a formative intent consisting in preparing the child for social life and making it capable of understanding the forms, means and spirit of this social life. It is still true that the predominant criterion of evaluation cannot but be that of the efficacy of the didactic means the cinema has or is capable of having on the subject and its spiritual capacities. With regard to the first point of view, that is the quantity of cognitions and contacts with reality distant in time and space, or commonly removed from the general sphere of action which the motion picture is able to offer the child, there is no possibility of doubt or difference of opinion on the question of its value. Then comes the second point of view. What objections can be made from the psychical and pedagogical point of view to the cinema ? Accusations against it have not been lacking. There is the one made by H. M. Fay (Le Cinematographic et /' enfant in the review Education for July 1 933). Naturally criticisms of film themes which are unsuitable for children or have a corrupting tendency do not enter into discussion. We are speaking of the cinema as cinema in its essential characteristics, which must appear and have their effect in scholastic applications. Objections and Jus The first criticism tifications. tnat may be ma(Je js that even when the motion picture puts before the child's sight objects which it could not otherwise have a chance of observing, the film shows it these objects in conditions that are different from those of ordinary observation. It sees the images in an artificial light, which isolates the picture from the surrounding darkness, destroying the rest of the reality and the competition or interference of any other than the purely visual sensation. This criticism applies equally to the motion picture and lantern slides, even if the absorption of the attention is greater for the former than for the latter, for reasons into which it is not necessary for the moment to enter. It may be said that while the artificiality of the luminous conditions of the image itself is an undoubted and apparently insuperable drawback, but without grave consequence where it is otherwise impossible to present in its concrete living aspect the fact or phenomenon, the isolation of the image from all other perceptions, that is, practically speaking, from the spectator's real surroundings, has an aspect that is both useful and harmful at one and the same time. It is useful inasmuch as it draws all the attention to the object which is intensified and amplified by the projection, thus rendering the observation easy. It is harmful inasmuch as the spirit tends in this way to lose its aptitude of directing the attention