THE MOVIE MAKETH—WHAT KIND OF A MAN?
BEFORE going on to a discussion of the utilitarian as contrasted with
the recreational functions of the movie, it seems advisable to consider
for a moment a type of screen presentation that is both entertaining and
educational, fascinating the observer by its dramatic presentation of
the adventurous spirit that has forever urged mankind to dare the perils
of the outlands while, at the same time, it preserves for posterity
phases of wild life that may conceivably become obsolete in the near
future. “Nanook of the North,” depicting, as it does, the primitive but
heroic existence of an Eskimo endeavoring to find shelter and sustenance
for his family in the Arctic regions is an outstanding achievement in
this bifunctional form of screen-picture. If, as Stefansson asserts, the
far North is destined eventually to lure to its cold but stimulating
embrace a much higher civilization than has hitherto existed near the
Pole, Nanook and his kind are fated to succumb, despite the sterling
qualities they have displayed in overcoming the handicaps of their cruel
environment, to adventurous pioneers from the South, bringing with them
a greater menace to the Eskimos than that with which old Boreas has
vainly threatened them for ages.
Belatedly, but with thrilling efficiency, the camera is giving to us and
to our descendants pictures of savage and half-savage life against which
the irresistible power of the regnant races of the earth has issued a
decree of annihilation. The polar seas, the islands of the Pacific, the
deserts, mountain-tops, jungles, are shown to us on the screen as they
are to-day, as if this generation were frantically endeavoring to assure
itself that this romantic planet of ours is not really doomed to become
eventually as prosaic and uninteresting as Main Street.
In illustration of the above, permit me to quote here from an article of
mine in a recent number of _The Independent_:
The call of the wild and the rattle of a Ford car are strangely
incongruous sounds, but they have been dramatically brought
together of late. Adventurous dare-devils in various parts of
the world are using the camera to rescue from oblivion the
vanishing fauna of the outlands. The defiant jungle surrenders
unconditionally to the tin Lizzie. I recently spent an enjoyable
and enlightening evening watching H. A. Snow hunting big game in
Africa with his gun and his photographic apparatus and
repeatedly looking death in the face that posterity might
possess a picture of the animal life under the equator that is
destined presently to become obsolete. The lion, rhinoceros,
elephant, giraffe, zebra, hippopotamus, wild buck, ostrich,
baboon, camel, gnu were ours for a time to study at close range,
revealed to us in their native habitat without the necessity
upon our part of spending months in constant peril from heat,
snakes, carnivora, fever, and other enemies which war against
the white man in African wilds.
As I watched the screen that evening, my memory went back nearly
half a century. It brought to my mind the picture of a boy
curled up in a library chair and absorbed in the pages of Paul
du Chaillu’s book “Under the Equator,” a book whose revelations
of wild life in Africa subjected the author to a period during
which he was suspected of being a Baron Munchausen, or, as we
would say to-day, a Dr. Cook. There were skeptics who bluntly
asserted that the French explorer had evolved the gorilla out of
his own inner consciousness.
Eventually, of course, du Chaillu’s veracity was established;
but, victim as he was of the limitations of his generation, he
could not at first furnish to the public convincing proof that
his tales of adventure and discovery in the African jungle were
founded upon fact. To-day the explorer, arctic or tropical,
returns to civilization as to Missouri—prepared to show all
scoffers that their incredulity is ridiculous. Defiantly he has
turned a crank while sudden death from a polar bear or a jungle
elephant is close at hand; and eventually the imminence of the
peril, the suspense of a tragic moment, are within the power of
the screen to transmit to wide-eyed audiences safely seated
twenty thousand miles away from the scene of the thrilling
episode!
As the camera is more thorough and convincing in its revelations
of the drama of the jungle than is the pen so is it more
extravagant in its use of the material that makes the wild life
of the outlands interesting to the untravelled public. There may
remain untamed animals in Africa that the Snows have not
effectively screened, but a fair acquaintance with equatorial
fauna leads me to the conclusion that the camera can afford now
to rest upon its laurels in so far as the creatures of the
jungle are concerned.
Omnivorous, insatiable, the screen is sending out its camera-men
to all the corners of the known and the unknown earth, to the
end that you and I may learn eventually every secret that our
planet has hitherto concealed. The truth, the whole truth, and
nothing but the truth—that’s why Man, who has become a
peripatetic photographer, is venturing to lands afar. And the
public is glad to confer applause, and more material rewards,
upon those who mirror for us some dramatic phase of life upon
earth to-day especially if, as is the case with the big game of
Africa, it bids fair to pass presently forever out of existence.
President Harding, whose present exalted position gives him unequalled
facilities for observing the potential tendencies of the day, has become
an enthusiastic believer in the uplifting possibilities that the screen
has begun to manifest. Much of what we study in our youth, says the
President, might be
made dramatically interesting if we could see it. Next in value
to studying history by the procedure of living through its
epochs, its eras and its periods, would be to see its actors and
evolutions presented before our eyes. If we are to understand
the present and attempt to conjecture the future, we need to
know a good deal about the backgrounds of the past. The Europe
of the later middle ages, of the period just before and at the
beginning of the Renaissance, could be wonderfully portrayed in
a series of pictures dramatizing “The Cloister and the Hearth.”
I do not know whether anybody reads “The Cloister and the
Hearth” any more, but I am sure that one family with which I am
pretty well acquainted would be glad to patronize a combination
of picture serials and really intelligent talks with this story
as the basis and with the purpose of giving a real conception
and understanding of the Europe of that epoch.
Mr. Harding has grasped fully the significance of the motion picture in
connection with the past, present, and future of the race. He has
suggested the screening of Wells’s “Outline of History” and of Van
Loon’s “Story of Mankind,” and has called attention to the possibility
that, under the direction of the Federal Bureau of Standards, films
might be taken illustrating the fundamental principles of the science of
geology. Realizing, as he does, that ignorance is the enemy democracy,
in order to survive, must overcome, and that the surest safeguard to our
institutions is enlightenment, President Harding has thrown himself
wholeheartedly into that growing movement which is destined eventually,
if Fate is kind to us, to make the motion picture worthy in its
achievements of the splendid possibilities that are within its grasp.
That potent, pushing, perverse offspring of the printing-press, the
newspaper, has begun to realize that it can be no longer exclusively
typographical but must become in part photographical. It is following in
the footsteps of the screen in making use of the only universal language
the ingenuity of Man has yet devised. A recent editorial in the New York
_Tribune_ says:
The _Tribune_ was the first newspaper to adapt for journalistic
purposes the printing of the half-tone photograph. The
innovation started the rising flood of news-in-pictures which is
so distinctive a feature of the American press of 1923.... Some
of the events of the day’s news can be visualized for the reader
simply by the printed word. Others need the aid of a picture.
Others still find presentation possible in a picture alone....
The universal appeal of pictures can be taken advantage of for
sound informative and educational purposes, instead of for
scandal and filth. Indeed, it should be so used, as the London
_Times_ and other conservative newspapers have realized through
their daily pages of pictures.
“The universal appeal of pictures!” Mankind from the days when our
ancestors sketched reindeer upon the walls of their caves has felt their
appeal, but only recently has its universality become of crucial
significance to the race. The printing-press, as we realized
despairingly in 1914, has failed to save civilization from its recurrent
attempts at suicide. Men read and talked, and, then, as had their
illiterate progenitors, grasped their weapons and went to fighting.
Neither from books nor from debates has mankind in the mass grasped that
enlightenment which often comes to individuals but which is not
sufficiently wide-spread and compelling to defend the race from constant
reversions to brutish manifestations.
And now comes visualization—in movie theatres, in newspapers, in
schools, colleges, churches—to mould, for good or evil, the plastic soul
of Man. What will the harvest be? Who can say? Francis Bacon asserted
that “reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an
exact man.” Something more, as the centuries have proved, is necessary
to make the human race what it should be. Is it not barely possible that
some Bacon of the future will exultingly exclaim: “The screen maketh a
civilized man!”?
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