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.
THE ADULT AND THE CINEMA
which we discussed all points raised in her contribution with complete frankness.) It is this influence on our emotional life which makes a social study of film so imperative.
Our present material must be regarded only as a beginning. The documents which I shall publish in the third volume of this series are already nearer to the emotional sphere of the film experience. Ultimately, only by prolonged case studies for which Weizsacker in his Studien zur Pathogenese has given an example, will it be possible to establish a firm inter-relation of a psychological and a sociological study of film.
Perhaps I may be allowed to indicate where, in my opinion, contemporary psychologists have failed us — so far. If I examine the present documents, I am astonished at the poverty of values of which account is given (see Nos. 35, 37, 43, 44, 52, 60). This is naturally not the fault of the contributors; it is the films which are to blame. I give an example: take a film like To Have and Have Not. What are the values which this film carries?
Excitement, lust, passion, beauty, love, bravery, self-sacrifice, heroism, friendship, family, patriotism.
I hope I have omitted nothing of 'importance'. Moreover, I have mentioned only the positive values because the negative ones never triumph in films. These are the very same values, though with some modifications and additions, which you find in our documents or in other films with a similar theme. Now I would contend that our real life is — still — very much richer. Furthermore, the values in our real lives are less listable.
In other words, social attitudes are varied, subtle, full of meaning, transitional and enigmatic. The great literature of all languages demonstrates my point: take Hamlet's character; take Goethe's Princess in his Tasso. Whole libraries have been written about their attitudes, because they are ineffabile. In contrast the very essence of film appears to be static; speed cannot replace the profoundness of the human soul. Film directors are, admittedly, struggling with this problem. There are many sequences in Charlie Chaplin's films or in Rene Clair's films, not to mention Eisenstein's films which come near to the immortal images of great art. Yet, generally speaking, this function of art, to make us aware of the infinity of the human world, is not helped by film. On the contrary we are made into types, until we may be unable to appreciate what life is really all about.
Naturally film is not the cause of this process though it has undoubtedly become a means of speeding up its tempo. Film is
272