That Marvel—The Movie: A Glance at Its Past, Its Promising Present and Its Significant FutureVan Zile, Edward S. (Edward Sims)
History
That Marvel—The Movie: A Glance at Its Past, Its Promising Present and Its Significant Future
Van Zile, Edward S. (Edward Sims)
Motion pictures
The sentence in italics above, in which Palmer asserts that the great
truths that have been revealed to him have come to him not from books
but from the vividness of gun flashes on the field of battle, brings us
to the crux of our argument, and will be used presently as a point of
departure for what may prove to be a constructive suggestion of some
value. If mankind is to be taught to follow the method employed by the
individual in using the errors of the past to ensure a better future
_the race must be enabled to visualize its past_. If it refuses to gain
enlightenment through books some other medium for making history the
savior of posterity must be found. And it has been found. The great
truths that were revealed by gun flashes to Frederick Palmer can find
their way to the hearts and minds of the masses of men if we are wise
and far-sighted enough to make full and intelligent use of a new medium
through which Man may gaze upon the mistakes and shortcomings of his
past, and, forewarned, avoid them in the future.
The race has found at last its universal language, its Esperanto not of
the ear and tongue but of the eye. The evolution of the motion picture,
developing in a few years from a toy kinetoscope to a Griffith
wonder-worker, has made possible, for the first time in the history of
humanity, an appeal to the heart and mind and soul of man that overcomes
the ancient handicap of the confusion of tongues. After many centuries
the check to human progress given at the Tower of Babel has come to an
end at the entrance to the motion-picture palace. It has been made
possible at last for history to reveal its secrets, and vouchsafe its
warnings, not to the comparatively few who read scholarly books, but to
the millions who, as democracy conquers the earth, have become masters
of the destiny of nations.
In a brilliant and impressive address delivered last July by Will H.
Hays at Boston, Mass., before the National Education Association, the
speaker presented facts and figures demonstrating the marvellous
progress made of late by the motion picture as a medium for instruction
in both schools and colleges. He said:
To reflect on the possibilities of the motion picture in
education is to regret that one’s school days were spent before
this great invention came to us as a poultice to heal the blows
of ignorance, but there is consolation in the fact that since
the advent of pictures the whole world, regardless of age, can
go to school.
“Regardless of age”—yes, and, also, regardless of race, language,
inherited or acquired prejudices, and the hot passions that result in
man’s inhumanity to man. In other words, the human race may now sit
before a screen and learn through the universal medium of the eye those
great truths that have been revealed to Frederick Palmer by the vivid
flashes of the battle-field.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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