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THE CINEMA, HYGIENE AND PREVENTION
OF DISEASE
BY
Lucien Viborel
SECRETARY GENERAL OF THE PROPAGANDA BUREAU OP THE SOCIAL HYGIENE SERVICE OF THE PUBLIC HEALTH MINISTRY
Propaganda by the The propaganda work Educational Cin j d Qn fa ^ Ed
ema for Hygiene '_
and Prevention of cational Cinema in Social Diseases. the interests of hy
giene and the prevention of social disease increases year by year. We propose to offer here some incontestable proofs of this fact, at the same time expressing all the faith and trust we have in this powerful means for spreading a knowledge of general information.
Whether we desire to render scholastic teaching more concrete and to allow the elementary and rural schools to profit by the discoveries made with the use of the microscope in scientific laboratories, or whether we are anxious to place before our children's eyes those portions of the globe it will never be their fate to see, or whether we wish to furnish workers with that minimum of culture to which Madame Diehl so eloquently referred at the Rome International Cinema Congress and the International Women's Council or whether we seek to help mankind to avoid the perils and scourges which menace them or to improve their future, it is in every case to the motion pictures that we must have recourse.
As far as we ourselves are concerned, we employ the cinema in a quite limited and definite manner, that is, for spreading a knowledge of hygiene and social disease prevention.
Teaching and Educational Film.
There is no need to insist on the value of the teaching film that accompanies and completes the teacher's lesson, but we hold
it to be useful until the student becomes a grown man when we must use the educational film to spread notions of hygiene and prophylaxis among the masses.
The educational film, we have had occasion to notice, has been used by the lecturers of the General Commission of Social Hygiene, at the meetings in villages in projections planned by various agricultural societies, in the workshop and factory, in the barracks and on board ships of the navy, where it is advisable to teach the men how to defend their health from dangers and take advantage of common experience.
We had the honour three years ago to discuss the matter of teaching hygiene in the schools by means of the motion picture. We repeated what Professor Leon Bernard stated with all the authority at his command : « it is a manifest truth that hygiene cannot become a regular thing in a people's habits unless it has first become implanted in their spirits, incorporated, so to speak, in their psychology. Nothing can be hoped from coercive measures in this direction, nor from too theoretical teaching. What we must do is to show the disadvantages which derives from a lack of hygiene and the individual and general benefits which hygiene brings in its train ».
No other medium can prove so effective for this kind of instruction as the cinema, which, by means of its documentary films, can render notions which have hitherto remained obscure and difficult luminous and within the reach of all, at the same time making hygiene seem an attractive subject by romance and anecdotical pictures.