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.
MOVIES AND CONDUCT
Birth of a Nation; the individual response in such a case tends to be simply a reflection of his customary social outlook.
Another powerful type of influence can be exerted by films with religious or semi-religious themes. The effect is often very similar to that produced by films in which sorrow or pathos are dominant, and is manifested in a temporary desire to be 'good'. We have recently been confronted with a number of pictures of this kind, notably The Song of Bernadette and Going My Way, both of which have been extremely popular. It has been suggested that this popularity is connected with the emotional conditions created by war, and there may be some truth in this view, but a very deep impression seems to have been made also by pre-war religious pictures such as King of Kings, The Ten Commandments, etc. Although generally such impressions are transient, if they happen to reinforce an attitude or inclination already present in the individual's mind the result may be of some practical significance.
Conclusion
It would seem uncontestable from the evidence which Professor Blumer brings forward, fragments of which have been quoted above, that motion pictures may affect conceptions of life and initiate schemes of conduct. One reason for this is the extensive range of topics presented in the cinema, many of which are new and fascinating material to the average filmgoer whose experience is generally of a limited kind. If as a child he goes to the pictures regularly and sees there aspects of life portrayed in a particular way, he will naturally form his views of those aspects of life from the screen images, unless he has access to other sources of information which would act as a corrective or antidote. And, since in films the extremes are often depicted as though they were the norm, he will tend to acquire a distorted vision of life, if he is not sufficiently astute to realise that much of what he sees is intended simply as 'entertainment', and does not provide an interpretation of reality.
In this connection it is very important to bear in mind that the people who wrote the accounts on which Professor Blumer bases his study were in the main of a sophisticated and comparatively cultured class. This may not be altogether true of the high school children, but it certainly applies to the university and college writers. The point is that even among these people the influence of films is clearly very strong, and it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that in the much larger class of filmgoers who are less
167