International Review of Educational Cinematography (Jan-Dec 1934)

356 EDUCATIONAL CINEMATOGRAPHY cess from the ordinary conditions of common experience, substituting for ordinary experience a unilateral exceptional experence. It may be reasonably argued that the sound film offers and will continue more and more in the future to offer a remedy for this state of things, since it adds to the visual image the sounds and voices of nature of men and animals, and opens for the art of the screen marvellous possibilities. We must however, remember that in the use of the cinema in teaching, the addition of aural sensation can only prove practically impossible or at any rate a source of disturbance. It must be used in an extremely limited way when — as didactic requirements will often impose — the teacher s word must supply an explanatory comment to the succession of pictures on the screen. Taking it altogether, it is my opinion that the sound film — apart from its undoubted value in the entertainment, documentary and cultural fields — is destined to play a very small part in teaching proper, that is, as an instrument and aid to the lesson. I should like to insist on the opinion which is commonly held and has become almost definite, excluding sound pictures from teaching films, since they take the master's part of illustrating the images with oral comment. This kind of film is altogether too rigid and preconceived, unsusceptible of variations and adaptations. This is due in great part to the mechanical nature and unchangeable form of the sound film comment. If the undoubted advantages of the film and its wealth of detail for the scholars' minds can permit us to accept without obvious harm artificial representations which are quite outside the contrl of theo teacher, the harm will prove very serious if the teacher's live and communicative words are not allowed to illustrate certain phases of films, adapting the explanation to the circumstances of different cases and the intelligence of the pupil, introducing personal touches and special details on which a great deal of the efficacy of all teaching depends. The film should be in corporated as best it can in a didactic process of a personal character, in a living relationship between pupil and teacher. Any tendency to accentuate the preconceived schematic and unalterable character of a didactic sound film where the comment that should come from the teacher is given by the loud speaker, can be nothing but a pedagogical monstrosity. The Cine-didactic This aspect of cinema Method. representations which discards the collaboration of the other senses leads us to consider more thoroughly the essential problem of the use of fixed or moving luminous projections in the schools in regard to the requirements of the method. For it is clear that the object placed before the child's observing faculties will engage its attention just so much more as the process of observation can be personal and one in which all the senses can take a thorough part, and with and through them the higher functions of the mind, memory, judgment, reason. It should be remembered that to inquire and explore mental situations with all our senses means remembering, comparing, judging, synthetizing and a more or less complete form of reasoning. We cannot but admit, in this connection, that the use of luminous projections in the schools constitutes in certain respects an improvement of the purely intuitive method rather than the active method which is now in the ascendant in didactics and the contemporary school. We do not mean to say that fixed projections or films have nothing in common with the active method. Everything which arouses a lively interest and a keen and wakeful curiosity forms part, in a wide sense, of the active method. At the same time, we should take care to observe that where it is possible to see everything, then there is less field left and less impulse is available to stir the fancy and allow it to have a free form of expression. Nor would we care to deny that, indirectly, the acquisition of rich visual experiences