With local journalism will come devices for advertising home enterprises.
Some staple products will be made attractive by having film-actors show
their uses. The motion pictures will be in the public schools to stay.
Text-books in geography, history, zoõlogy, botany, physiology, and other
sciences will be illustrated by standardized films. Along with these
changes, there will be available at certain centres collections of films
equivalent to the Standard Dictionary and the Encyclopædia Britannica.
And sooner or later we will have a straight-out capture of a complete
film expression by the serious forces of civilization. The merely
impudent motion picture will be relegated to the leisure hours with
yellow journalism. Photoplay libraries are inevitable, as active if not
as multitudinous as the book-circulating libraries. The oncoming
machinery and expense of the motion picture is immense. Where will the
money come from? No one knows. What the people want they will get. The
race of man cannot afford automobiles, but has them nevertheless. We
cannot run away into non-automobile existence or non-steam-engine or
non-movie life long at a time. We must conquer this thing. While the more
stately scientific and educational aspects just enumerated are slowly on
their way, the artists must be up and about their ameliorative work.
Every considerable effort to develop a noble idiom will count in the
final result, as the writers of early English made possible the language
of the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton. We are perfecting a medium to be
used as long as Chinese ideographs have been. It will no doubt, like the
Chinese language, record in the end massive and classical treatises,
imperial chronicles, law-codes, traditions, and religious admonitions.
All this by the _motion picture_ as a recording instrument, not
necessarily the _photoplay_, a much more limited thing, a form of art.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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