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Page 5
Certainly the history of these enterprises is full of adventures worthy
to rank with the most daring feats in the newspaper world. We hear that
when the investiture of the Prince of Wales was performed at Carnarvon
at four o'clock in the afternoon, the public of London at ten o'clock of
the same day saw the ceremony on the screen in a moving picture twelve
minutes in length. The distance between the two places is two hundred
miles. The film was seven hundred and fifty feet long. It had been
developed and printed in a special express train made up of long freight
cars transformed into dark rooms and fitted with tanks for the
developing and washing and with a machine for printing and drying. Yet
on the whole the current events were slowly losing ground even in
Europe, while America had never given such a large share of interest to
this rival of the newspaper. It is claimed that the producers in America
disliked these topical pictures because the accidental character of the
events makes the production irregular and interferes too much with the
steady preparation of the photoplays. Only when the war broke out, the
great wave of excitement swept away this apathy. The pictures from the
trenches, the marches of the troops, the life of the prisoners, the
movements of the leaders, the busy life behind the front, and the action
of the big guns absorbed the popular interest in every corner of the
world. While the picturesque old-time war reporter has almost
disappeared, the moving picture man has inherited all his courage,
patience, sensationalism, and spirit of adventure.
A greater photographic achievement, however, than the picturing of the
social and historic events was the marvelous success of the
kinematograph with the life of nature. No explorer in recent years has
crossed distant lands and seas without a kinematographic outfit. We
suddenly looked into the most intimate life of the African wilderness.
There the elephants and giraffes and monkeys passed to the waterhole,
not knowing that the moving picture man was turning his crank in the top
of a tree. We followed Scott and Shackleton into the regions of eternal
ice, we climbed the Himalayas, we saw the world from the height of the
a�roplane, and every child in Europe knows now the wonders of Niagara.
But the kinematographer has not sought nature only where it is gigantic
or strange; he follows its path with no less admirable effect when it is
idyllic. The brook in the woods, the birds in their nest, the flowers
trembling in the wind have brought their charm to the delighted eye more
and more with the progress of the new art.
But the wonders of nature which the camera unveils to us are not limited
to those which the naked eye can follow. The technical progress led to
the attachment of the microscope. After overcoming tremendous
difficulties, the scientists succeeded in developing a microscope
kinematography which multiplies the dimensions a hundred thousand times.
We may see on the screen the fight of the bacteria with the
microscopically small blood corpuscles in the blood stream of a diseased
animal. Yes, by the miracles of the camera we may trace the life of
nature even in forms which no human observation really finds in the
outer world. Out there it may take weeks for the orchid to bud and
blossom and fade; in the picture the process passes before us in a few
seconds. We see how the caterpillar spins its cocoon and how it breaks
it and how the butterfly unfolds its wings; and all which needed days
and months goes on in a fraction of a minute. New interest for geography
and botany and zo�logy has thus been aroused by these developments,
undreamed of in the early days of the kinematograph, and the scientists
themselves have through this new means of technique gained unexpected
help for their labors.
The last achievement in this universe of photoknowledge is "the magazine
on the screen." It is a bold step which yet seemed necessary in our day
of rapid kinematoscopic progress. The popular printed magazines in
America had their heydey in the muckraking period about ten years ago.
Their hold on the imagination of the public which wants to be informed
and entertained at the same time has steadily decreased, while the power
of the moving picture houses has increased. The picture house ought
therefore to take up the task of the magazines which it has partly
displaced. The magazines give only a small place to the news of the day,
a larger place to articles in which scholars and men of public life
discuss significant problems. Much American history in the last two
decades was deeply influenced by the columns of the illustrated
magazines. Those men who reached the millions by such articles cannot
overlook the fact--they may approve or condemn it--that the masses of
today prefer to be taught by pictures rather than by words. The
audiences are assembled anyhow. Instead of feeding them with mere
entertainment, why not give them food for serious thought? It seemed
therefore a most fertile idea when the "Paramount Pictograph" was
founded to carry intellectual messages and ambitious discussions into
the film houses. Political and economic, social and hygienic, technical
and industrial, esthetic and scientific questions can in no way be
brought nearer to the grasp of millions. The editors will have to take
care that the discussions do not degenerate into one-sided propaganda,
but so must the editors of a printed magazine. Among the scientists the
psychologist may have a particular interest in this latest venture of
the film world. The screen ought to offer a unique opportunity to
interest wide circles in psychological experiments and mental tests and
in this way to spread the knowledge of their importance for vocational
guidance and the practical affairs of life.
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