Sociology of film : studies and documents (1946)

CHAPTER 6 Children and the Cinema — [continued) . . . nothing psychological is truly measurable {in spite of useful fictions used in intelligence and similar testing) . J. T. MacCurdy, The Structure of Morale, p. 128. DOCUMENTS AND COMMENTARIES We continued to apply our essay method. This method has the advantage of giving our contributors a free field in which to express themselves. There was no guidance given except what was implied by the title. The strait-jacket of the questionnaire method was thus successfully avoided. The following twenty-two essays were obtained from the same school in Hampstead as the preceding ones in Chapter V. Yet the contributors are on the average not older than 1 %\. They definitely belong to the child age. Their parents are probably mostly members of the middle class. The children are well looked after. It would appear that many parents or mothers accompany their children to the cinema. Various points clearly distinguish these children from the other age groups. They are all less plot-conscious, or rather they still have language difficulties in describing a plot. (Essay 12 is in this respect of particular importance.) The preference for technicolour films, as is evident from Nos. 1, 2, 9, 16, 22, is also striking. Perhaps we do not know enough yet about colour preferences with regard to film, but I am inclined to believe that children up to the age group under discussion generally prefer technicolour films, because, if I may put it tentatively, their rationalising mechanisms are still undeveloped. (If I am not mistaken those among adult cinema goers who have little or no formal education tend to show the same preference for colour-films. Colour takes the place of dialogue or of a complicated plot. To what extent colour corresponds 109