We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
Musings of t
" The TVioiop/a Tttflosopher"'
\ 1 *1W,'
So much is said about the National Board of Censors, that it may be well to give a few facts concerning them, which I have taken from their own circular. The Censoring Committee is made up of social workers, literary and professional people and earnest men and women of general culture, Avho -give their time entirely without compensation. They desire and earnestly invite criticism and correspondence from the public. They take the position that Motion Pictures are a form of dramatic art, and, as such, they deal with real life and with the problems of real life. Among these problems are moral ones, involving conduct which, in real life, would be criminal. They know that the drama of all ages has dealt with real life and with its serious moral problems, but they insist that Motion Pictures shall contain no sensationalism and no representation of crime, except with the object of conveying a moral lesson. Crime for crime's sake is condemned. But for the extreme demand that is sometimes made, namely, that all pictures of crime or violence be forbidden, the Board is compelled to point out that such a standard would prohibit practically all of Shakespeare and the other classics, and even some of the best Biblical Motion Pictures that have been made, and would likewise make impossible such historical pictures as the life of Washington. Nor is it possible, they maintain, to confine Motion Pictures to those themes which are entirely proper to discuss in the presence of children. Anyway, more than two-thirds of the total audiences are adult. And last, but not least, the Board points out that the Motion Picture theater involves many problems other than the problem of the Motion Picture, and they urgently ask co-operation on the part of the authorities to better the conditions wherever pictures are shown.
If Motion Pictures were but a novelty, they would never have lasted out these twenty years. There are two important, fundamental principles underlying the art that have made them a permanent institution — dramatic art and education. We all have the dramatic instinct, in greater or less degree, and since our ancestors for thousands of years back also had it, there seems little danger that it will die. We are now witnessing the decadence of the dramatic stage, but seldom does any great institution fade away without leaving an improved substitute in its place. The Photoplay is the logical and natural successor to the stage play, but let us hope that there is room for both.
The State Home and Reformatory for Boys at Jamesburg, N. J., has adopted Motion Pictures as a part of its discipline. Good results have already been noted. One novel experiment is the use of humorous pictures, the idea being that while a boy is laughing he can harbor no criminal thoughts.
137