International Review of Educational Cinematography (Jan-Dec 1934)

740 EDUCATIONAL CINEMATOGRAPHY rooms where at a small cost expectant or nursing mothers who would not have time to cook a nourishing dinner can obtain wholesome food that they need. Again, there are infant-care courses of all kinds : some attached to the school, others to the factory or the dispensary; permanent courses in the large towns, itinerant courses in the country. These latter are sometimes facilitated by scientifically equipped motor-vans and provide lessons in maternal hygiene for future mothers, adapted in each individual case to their living conditions. The main object is to deliver a direct attack on bad local habits in diet or deeply rooted antihygienic prejudices. The cinema can not only spread the news of this education in maternal hygiene and infant care and thus stimulate other districts to follow a good example; it can itself be the means of education in infant care, and the most ubiquitous of all. And it would indeed not be an ungrateful task for a cinematographist to film these scenes of childhood made radiant and joyous by devoted care; with mothers happy, or at least completely at ease, in the security afforded them by well-organised social assistance; future mothers intent on the great duty awaiting them, and preparing for it with a devotion fortified by the knowledge that there will be no lack of the means of fulfilment. C) The cinema may also employ its varied resources to disseminate, in the same way, the principle of the protection of working girls. Much as before, its purpose will be to make known the dangers of various kinds that beset the child in its working life, and threaten the healthy development of ks adolescence; and to make known also the necessary means of protection. One of the first dangers to avoid in childhood is premature employment; it would be easy to show by films the physical, and in some cases the moral harm that may be done to children of tender age by various classes of work in industry, on the sea, in the fields, in shops, in offi ces, on the stage, in itinerant occupation, etc. The injuries here in question may take on very different forms : some may result in deformities in a body not yet robust — this is a feature of many manual occupations — others contaminate the mind not yet sufficiently stable to withstand bad examples, or at least to save itself from defilement by premature contact with adult vice or passion. The occupational life of the young hotel page or child hawker is fraught with the dangers of the second class. After showing the need for fixing the minimum age for admission to work sufficiently high to avoid the most serious of these dangers, the cinema might give an idea of the precautions that should continue to surround the child at work until manhood or womanhood; regular medical supervision, reasonable hours of work, and jobs that are particularly unhealthy, dangerous or trying. It could also show how, for the greater good of society and the individual alike, the occupation should be suited to the aptitudes of the individual; and how in adolescence, through vocational guidance well-conceived and generally applied, every endeavour should be made to find everyone the job for which he or she is best fitted. VIII. THE CINEMA AND INDUSTRIAL MEDICINE The service that the cinema renders hygiene may be instanced by the following types of film: a) Purely scientific films: The difficulties of production are easily overcome by modern technique. These films are usually short but very interesting. They appeal to the public because they take it into a world that is almost, if not entirely, unknown. b) Films for auxiliary medical staff or for schools: Here the aim is quite a special one, and these films are extremely useful for students and medical specialists.