=The Moving Picture.=--The influence of the "movies" is the strongest,
the most all-compelling influence to which children have ever been
subjected. There has never been an agency that so appealed to all the
senses, especially to the eye with its supreme registry of
impressions, and we have so far let it play upon child-life with
little direction from the educative process. What it is right and
helpful to read is not always right and helpful to put upon the stage,
with the more vivid and popular appeal to eye and ear and with the
lessened opportunity of the drama to explain and soften and balance
the presentation of tragedy and evil. What the drama may safely give
to the smaller and generally older audiences which it draws may not be
suitable from any point of view, either of art or of moral influence,
for the coarser and more pronounced representation of the moving
picture. There is a place for film presentation that is unique and it
may easily become the greatest educational agency in all recreational
life. That place, however, seems self-limited to pictures of life that
can be imitated without social harm, insofar as very young children
are concerned.
=Needed Supervision.=--Although much will inevitably be given in the
moving pictures which contains incidents that any wise person would
not take part in for themselves, the main ideal and the outcome of the
situations must be such as to leave a tendency toward good and not
toward evil, if children and youth are safely to receive its strong
impressions. This is understood by those who are "trying to elevate
the moving picture," but too often the reformers and the educators are
so far removed from the main sources of control of any business or art
centre that they only brush the outskirts of the agencies that purvey
to public amusement and fail to reach any citadel of real control.
There is a general uneasiness, however, among many people of all
classes, even those usually very easy-going about any social
influence, as they read the tales of children testifying in the courts
as to their "hold-ups" and their burglaries that they did them "like
the movies" they had seen. It is surely true that the next thing we
must do is to tame these "movies" and make them work in social harness
for the better, and not the worse, in the lives of children and youth.
What line of cleavage may be drawn between what the elders may see and
what should not be allowed so vividly to impress the younger minds, no
one can predict. The recent public announcement of a determination to
cleanse and uplift the moving picture business from within its own
management is a most hopeful sign. But surely no parent can throw all
the blame of any evil influence of a film exhibit upon the managers of
a theatre! Where are the parents, and what are they about, that they
do not know what pictures their children see and how often they go to
any place of amusement?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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