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Page 44
The difficulties in the way of the right moral influence are still
greater than in the intellectual field. Certainly it is not enough to
have the villain punished in the last few pictures of the reel. If
scenes of vice or crime are shown with all their lure and glamour the
moral devastation of such a suggestive show is not undone by the
appended social reaction. The misguided boys or girls feel sure that
they would be successful enough not to be trapped. The mind through a
mechanism which has been understood better and better by the
psychologists in recent years suppresses the ideas which are contrary to
the secret wishes and makes those ideas flourish by which those
"subconscious" impulses are fulfilled. It is probably a strong
exaggeration when a prominent criminologist recently claimed that
"eighty-five per cent. of the juvenile crime which has been investigated
has been found traceable either directly or indirectly to motion
pictures which have shown on the screen how crimes could be committed."
But certainly, as far as these demonstrations have worked havoc, their
influence would not have been annihilated by a picturesque court scene
in which the burglar is unsuccessful in misleading the jury. The true
moral influence must come from the positive spirit of the play itself.
Even the photodramatic lessons in temperance and piety will not rebuild
a frivolous or corrupt or perverse community. The truly upbuilding play
is not a dramatized sermon on morality and religion. There must be a
moral wholesomeness in the whole setting, a moral atmosphere which is
taken as a matter of course like fresh air and sunlight. An enthusiasm
for the noble and uplifting, a belief in duty and discipline of the
mind, a faith in ideals and eternal values must permeate the world of
the screen. If it does, there is no crime and no heinous deed which the
photoplay may not tell with frankness and sincerity. It is not necessary
to deny evil and sin in order to strengthen the consciousness of eternal
justice.
But the greatest mission which the photoplay may have in our community
is that of esthetic cultivation. No art reaches a larger audience
daily, no esthetic influence finds spectators in a more receptive frame
of mind. On the other hand no training demands a more persistent and
planful arousing of the mind than the esthetic training, and never is
progress more difficult than when the teacher adjusts himself to the
mere liking of the pupils. The country today would still be without any
symphony concerts and operas if it had only received what the audiences
believed at the moment that they liked best. The esthetically
commonplace will always triumph over the significant unless systematic
efforts are made to re�nforce the work of true beauty. Communities at
first always prefer Sousa to Beethoven. The moving picture audience
could only by slow steps be brought from the tasteless and vulgar
eccentricities of the first period to the best plays of today, and the
best plays of today can be nothing but the beginning of the great upward
movement which we hope for in the photoplay. Hardly any teaching can
mean more for our community than the teaching of beauty where it reaches
the masses. The moral impulse and the desire for knowledge are, after
all, deeply implanted in the American crowd, but the longing for beauty
is rudimentary; and yet it means harmony, unity, true satisfaction, and
happiness in life. The people still has to learn the great difference
between true enjoyment and fleeting pleasure, between real beauty and
the mere tickling of the senses.
Of course, there are those, and they may be legion today, who would
deride every plan to make the moving pictures the vehicle of esthetic
education. How can we teach the spirit of true art by a medium which is
in itself the opposite of art? How can we implant the idea of harmony by
that which is in itself a parody on art? We hear the contempt for
"canned drama" and the machine-made theater. Nobody stops to think
whether other arts despise the help of technique. The printed book of
lyric poems is also machine-made; the marble bust has also "preserved"
for two thousand years the beauty of the living woman who was the model
for the Greek sculptor. They tell us that the actor on the stage gives
the human beings as they are in reality, but the moving pictures are
unreal and therefore of incomparably inferior value. They do not
consider that the roses of the summer which we enjoy in the stanzas of
the poet do not exist in reality in the forms of iambic verse and of
rhymes; they live in color and odor, but their color and odor fade away,
while the roses in the stanzas live on forever. They fancy that the
value of an art depends upon its nearness to the reality of physical
nature.
It has been the chief task of our whole discussion to prove the
shallowness of such arguments and objections. We recognized that art is
a way to overcome nature and to create out of the chaotic material of
the world something entirely new, entirely unreal, which embodies
perfect unity and harmony. The different arts are different ways of
abstracting from reality; and when we began to analyze the psychology of
the moving pictures we soon became aware that the photoplay has a way to
perform this task of art with entire originality, independent of the art
of the theater, as much as poetry is independent of music or sculpture
of painting. It is an art in itself. Only the future can teach us
whether it will become a great art, whether a Leonardo, a Shakespeare, a
Mozart, will ever be born for it. Nobody can foresee the directions
which the new art may take. Mere esthetic insight into the principles
can never foreshadow the development in the unfolding of civilization.
Who would have been bold enough four centuries ago to foresee the
musical means and effects of the modern orchestra? Just the history of
music shows how the inventive genius has always had to blaze the path in
which the routine work of the art followed. Tone combinations which
appeared intolerable dissonances to one generation were again and again
assimilated and welcomed and finally accepted as a matter of course by
later times. Nobody can foresee the ways which the new art of the
photoplay will open, but everybody ought to recognize even today that it
is worth while to help this advance and to make the art of the film a
medium for an original creative expression of our time and to mold by it
the esthetic instincts of the millions. Yes, it is a new art--and this
is why it has such fascination for the psychologist who in a world of
ready-made arts, each with a history of many centuries, suddenly finds a
new form still undeveloped and hardly understood. For the first time the
psychologist can observe the starting of an entirely new esthetic
development, a new form of true beauty in the turmoil of a technical
age, created by its very technique and yet more than any other art
destined to overcome outer nature by the free and joyful play of the
mind.
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