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INSTRUCTIONAL FILMS WITH A HERO 163
completeness but nevertheless as experienced by a human being. By this means the film is not only rendered more vivid and interesting, but also often more true. For the realities of nature are given their deepest meaning for man if presented as a social experience; even the extra-social nature of the primeval forest or the arctic ice-pack is in the last instance a social experience; the very conception of solitude is a correlative conception and acquires intellectual and emotional content only if we are aware of its opposite, non-solitude.
The first such documentaries of the silent film, showing the realities of some part of the world in the form of a human fate were Nanook of the North, Chang which gave a picture of the jungle and Moana, a film of the South Pacific.
In Chang the struggle of a poor Indian family of settlers against the jungle develops into the fierce war of an Indian village against a herd of wild elephants. It is a documentary but it is a drama built up according to all the rules of aesthetics and dramaturgy. We find even a parallel to the chorus in the antique tragedy in the band of monkeys anxiously watching the battle between men and elephants from the tops of the coconut palms. The monkey watchers are cut into the film in the same way as clever directors cut the excited crowd of fans into a sports scene. This magnificent pantomimic chorus of monkeys accompanies the struggle of the humans and stresses its every phase.
There is not one 'invented' scene in Chang. But every scene is 'directed'. In the way in which the scholar's lecture and explanations are rendered convincing by visual means, the artistic intention is manifested on a par with the didactic. It is quite probable that tame elephants had to be trained to play with the proper natural ferocity the part of the wild elephants before the camera. Even reality is shown more convincingly by such acting.
Another transitional film form, even more closely related to the feature film than is the documentary, is the biographical film which has recently become popular. In these there are of course many romantic, constructed scenes just as there are in the not quite strictly scientific biographical novels. Fine films have for instance been made of the lives of Edison, Pasteur,