National Board of Review Magazine (Jan 1929 - Dec 1930)

4 National Board of Review Magazine National Board does not deplore this; its work was, and is, intended as contribution freely given, and it is finding everyday more elaborate work to do, more service to perform. But it may be pardoned, if on its twentieth Anniversary, it recalls its share in the following achievements, offering its encouragement and support to all who, knowingly or unknowingly, have been concerned in them: ( 1 ) The theory of censorship has been weakened to the point of a diminishing fallacy. (2) The principle of selection and classification as a means of focusing public attention on the screen's finer efforts, with its corresponding tendency to raise public taste and create a demand whereby it is possible to produce better pictures, has received country-wide acceptance in the better films movement, started by the National Board in 1916. (3) The axiom that the screen must be left free to express itself, like the other arts, for the comprehension and enjoyment of the mentally mature, together with the corollary that the child's needs in screen entertainment must be recognized, respected and provided for, constitute a principle that has become basic in society's concept of the screen. This finds expression as to the second part, since 1915 when the National Board began its advocacy of the plan, in specially sponsored and conducted children's matinees; and as to the first part, in the public's growing tendency in the regular theatres to patronize motion pictures of a more serious and grown-up nature. (4) The general encouragement of a screen adapted to the needs of the more perceptive and art-loving audience where may be viewed the work of creative artists whose support is not to be expected in the theatre of more popular tastes ; a movement finding expression today in the growing number of Little Photoplay Theatres whose possibility the National Board began to demonstrate in 1917, and continues to demonstrate today in co-operation with communities, through showings of unusual films to specially invited and organized audiences, with a study of their response. (5) The present inclination to study the motion picture before passing judgment upon it, and to conduct all organized work for better pictures that is constructive in its purpos*", on a foundation of carefully ascertained facts, rather than on haphazard notions and preconceived beliefs. The National Board, after twenty years, in pointing out the trend of its activities over that period, registers a justifiable feeling that its part in stimulating public discrimination in motion pictures and in speaking out for their rightful freedom to development, has been a large one. Beyond what the screen has already achieved as entertainment, amazing as that is, what it may do as a teacher in the stricter sense, as an agent of science, as a carrier of news, as a means of intercommunication between peoples and races, is in the realm of those probabilities that daily enlarge themselves. Now that it appears to be adding sound and speech to its other powers, its scope of possibilities is a matter of further speculation. Whether the cinema — the silent pattern— will go one way as a form of individual art, and the sound picture another as a more general medium of entertainment and information, no wise person will wish for certain to say. But looking into the future the National Board can foresee for itself, and for the many groups working with it or along the general lines of its liberal policy, a greater usefulness and a more congenial responsibility in the same measure as it maintains a spirit of friendly cooperation, intelligent observation, and enthusiasm for one of mankind's greatest inventions. With this issue, the National Board of Review Magazine appears in a smaller and more compact form. Various considerations have persuaded us to make this change, a change for the better we hope. Also, perhaps, it is an indication of the increasing maturity of this publication. For this magazine is an outgrowth of a mere pamphlet, devoted exclusively to exceptional photoplays reviews, when the selected pictures bulletin was still a somewhat dreary mimeographed sheet and the better films department folded itself into a mere four pages. Now it has attained the dignity of a real magazine speaking with authority as a hous? organ for all the activities of the Board, and widely quoted wherever pictures are discussed. In this new form we hope that our friends will read it more intensely, cherish it more faithfully and recommend it more heartily to all lovers of better pictures.