Yet the figures of Aunt Jane and the Goddess of Suffrage are something
new in their fashion. Aunt Jane is a spiritual sister to that
unprecedented woman, Jane Addams, who went to the Hague conference for
Peace in the midst of war, which heroic action the future will not
forget. Aunt Jane does justice to that breed of women amid the sweetness
and flowers and mere scenario perils of the photoplay story. The presence
of the "Votes for Women" figure is the beginning of a line of photoplay
goddesses that serious propaganda in the new medium will make part of the
American Spiritual Hierarchy. In the imaginary film of Our Lady
Springfield, described in the chapter on Architecture-in-Motion, a
kindred divinity is presumed to stand by the side of the statue when it
first reaches the earth.
High-minded graduates of university courses in sociology and schools of
philanthropy, devout readers of The Survey, The Chicago Public, The
Masses, The New Republic, La Follette's, are going to advocate
increasingly, their varied and sometimes contradictory causes, in films.
These will generally be produced by heroic exertions in the studio, and
much passing of the subscription paper outside.
Then there are endowments already in existence that will no doubt be
diverted to the photoplay channel. In every state house, and in
Washington, D.C., increasing quantities of dead printed matter have been
turned out year after year. They have served to kindle various furnaces
and feed the paper-mills a second time. Many of these routine reports
will remain in innocuous desuetude. But one-fourth of them, perhaps, are
capable of being embodied in films. If they are scientific
demonstrations, they can be made into realistic motion picture records.
If they are exhortations, they can be transformed into plays with a
moral, brothers of the film Your Girl and Mine. The appropriations for
public printing should include such work hereafter.
The scientific museums distribute routine pamphlets that would set the
whole world right on certain points if they were but read by said world.
Let them be filmed and started. Whatever the congressman is permitted to
frank to his constituency, let him send in the motion picture form when
it is the expedient and expressive way.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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