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!”?