Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1920)

30 Photoplay Magazine Our churches are most excellent auditoriums. The majority of them are furnished with good organs, and skilled organists are engaged. These churches are a natural meeting place for establishing advantageous gatherings of people who are concerned with the betterment of their positions, educationally, pohticaily and in the terms of human culture. Motion pictures combine amusement, entertainment and education. Pictorial education is of extreme value. It establishes a quickening of the imagination. These pictures put us in contact with new scenes, give us new ideas, make us better acquainted with new personalities and belong in God's church as well as in the theatre. MY friend Cleveland Moffet, a brilliantminded author, suggested some years ago that the New York churches provide free moving picture entertainments. Money was subscribed to carry out this plan, several picture producers became philanthropically interested and evenings were devoted to delightful programs in many churches, the picturcjg being carefully selected. There is yet a wide difference of opinion as to the use of churches for anything other than religious services. Many believe that only solemn services should be conducted in our churches which they hold to be hallowed by years of sacred use. This closes to the public more than three billion dollars worth " of taxable property, save for throe or four hours e\ery week. Coming from a rector of an Episcopal church this may seem somewhat startling, but there is in that church a broad comprehensiveness which, even here in New York, contains two such extremes as the Church of St. Mary the Virgin and Dr. Heber Newton's church. I am called broad-minded or a "Broad Churchman," I take my stand for anything that makes for human happiness and the betterment of mankind. EVEN in the matter of news, which we all ought to have in as complete and comprehensive a form as possible, the movies can give the big essentials, unencumbered by the mass of reading matter and advertisements on which the commercial success of the press depends. The movies present no such dreadful looking abortions as are exploited in the newspapers on their cartoon pages. I will not call the cartoons by name, but in the movies one sees no such disgusting, unnatural distortions of human form and human nature. I believe that there is a difficult line between admiration for the human form and pruriency. A certain magazine of physical culture in its effort to show the public high ideals of physical strength and perfection has encountered this difficulty, i believe that just as the picture of Ebert and Noske recently published in the pictorial section of a great newspaper, almost naked, in bathing dress, disgusts the obser\-er with the uncovered forms and unathletic masculine flesh and bones, and has made this picture servicable to the enemies of the German reoublic, so, on the other hand, the repi-esentation to the eye of beautiful human beings can encourage more ideal ca^e and development of the body as well as giving legitimate pleasure. A pathetic side of human nature presents itself in the "bald head row" in our theatres. There is ro suggestion of salacity or pruriency in the beautiful pictures of types like OVER 2000 churches in the United States now utilize the motion picture. Broad-minded clergymen everywhere recognize that a force that can build and operate 14,000 theatres, and attract a daily attendance of 12,500,000 should be an ally in the work of carrying religion to the people. Every great denomination is considering ways and means of applying the influence of the screen to religion. The Methodist church committed itself quite avowedly to a motion picture program at its centennial celebration at Columbus, Ohio, last Summer. The motion pictures were criticized, despised, and buffeted by clergymen generally five years ago. The attitude of the church has changed with the gradual but certain improvement in the standards of entertainment and decency. The church was absolutely right in it's first position. It is right today. But there is still much to be done, for there are still producers who believe that questionable pictures are sure-fire successes. And the church can, by encouraging exhibitors who believe in clean pictures, and discouraging the others, make itself felt. The Better Photoplay League of America, which was sponsored by this publication, has shown the way. An unorganized majority is helpless. Photoplay carried on the work of organizing the patrons of motion pictures against exhibitors who showed salacious pictures, and the results were felt immediately in the box-office, the most vulnerable part of the exhibitors' and producers' anatomy. If picture conditions are not right in your town, organize your community and your exhibitor will listen attentively. if he does not, hit him in the box-office. He will hear you then. THE EDITOR. Annette Kellermann. They present the glory and beauty of physical perfection, the strongly developed human body battling against the waves or exhibited among beautiful natural surroundings. There is no trace of sex emotion here. The movies of today are our cleanest form of amusement. They are well censored; morality and right prevail. THERE are thousands of people who come to New York for a good time. Perhaps they select a Broadway theatre performance, a popular show. There is a snappy plot, catchy music and beautiful girls, but it is no part of culture, there is no uplift, no better ideas fill the mind. Georg Brandes said of William August Slaegel, the translator of Shakespeare, that he made Shakespeare part of German Culture. The Germans embraced Shakespeare to a far greater extent than Shakespeare's own fellow-countrymen. Not the theatre but the dramatic art occupies an important place in our development. The movies are in that class. Nothing sticks in the memory like visible images. I remember as a boy I had to practise my piano lessons over and over, p'aying the same piece of music again and again. Now, I am told great soloists visualize their notes. When they sing or play they are reading from the mind modern psychology stresses this point. In a Boston church which I used to frequent as a boy there was a most eloquent preacher, the Rev. Wayland Hoyt. He employed the old fashioned oratorical method of word-painting. I freely confess that the only sermon I remember was a description by Dr. Hoyt of his visit to Salisbury cathedral. Pen and word pictures are going out. The movies are supplanting them. Pictures are the supreme thing that the mind can see. Education by means of visual impressions is of the first importance. There is much that bears closely upon religion and social uplift in the Freudian psychoanalytic psychology. Most people spend much time in fantasy, day-dreaming, wool-gathering. The coward paints himself in heroic scenes, the shop girl pictures herself in a beautiful dress seated in the parterre of the opera. This is the stuff that "dreams are made of." Ideas fall into the mind not regulated by will or checked up by reality. People not only sit in dreams, but act in dreams. Our motion pictures are of the sort that the individual craves. First and foremost they possess whatever reality is to be had in story, drama, or educational films. The movies clear out the cobwebs of the mind, putting in carefully prepared facts. They are a tonic, a regulator, a clarifier of the inner life, of the imagination. We must think of the movies as that wonderful clean sweep that is clearing out the unhealthful fantasies of the brain. There is the problem of our adolescents. If our boys and sirls do not stay at home, what place have they where they may seek amusement? The street and the dance halls. 'What happens if they stay at home' I should rather have boys rnd girls go to the movies than to sit at home twirling their thumbs in a corner, imagining discordant, unruly, abnormal thoughts and brooding over budding and badly understood sex ideas. The movies furnish a clarification of youthful homebrewed fancies. (Continued on page 121)