Chapter XIV: The Movie Takes on New Functions

HAS a race harassed, well-nigh hopeless, forever committing old errors under new incitements, found in the screen both a pedagogue and a peacemaker, potent for rescue if its possibilities are grasped in time? The query may seem fantastic, the hope it suggests quixotic, the promise at which it hints premature. But the question is, perhaps, the most important before the world to-day and upon its answer may depend the future of the race.

In an address before the National Civic Federation at Washington, D. C., on January 17, 1923, Elihu Root said:

The manifest purpose of the great body of voters in democratic
countries to control directly the agents who are carrying on the
foreign affairs of their countries involves a terrible danger as
well as a great step in human progress—a great step in progress
if the democracy is informed, a terrible danger if the democracy
is ignorant. An ignorant democracy controlling foreign affairs
leads directly to war and the destruction of civilization. An
informed democracy insures peace and the progress of
civilization.

At this crisis in the career of humanity there is but one medium by which the democracies of the world can be given the information necessary, in the opinion of Mr. Root, to avert the cataclysm threatening humanity, and that is the motion picture screen. That this medium is becoming, by leaps and bounds, better equipped for its gigantic task of world-salvation is apparent to even the most careless observer. During the short time that has elapsed since the author wrote the first sentence of this little book, the movie has enlarged its scope, possibilities and actual achievements in a startling and bewildering way. To illustrate this point, which is of crucial significance in connection with the topic now under discussion, let me quote a few head-lines culled at random from the metropolitan press of recent date.

“Revolutionary Talking Movies—Widespread Changes Predicted if
New Invention is a Success.” “‘Color Film Great,’ says C. D.
Gibson. Artist at Private Exhibition Finds Effects Wonderfully
Reproduced.” “Ditmar’s Film Gives Life to the Prehistoric. Zoo
Curator Presents Real Live Monsters.” “Talking Movie Hailed in
Berlin by Scientists as Great Success.” “New Method Gives
Perfect Color to Motion Pictures. First Film a Riot of Color but
Not at Expense of Reality.” “Stereoscopic Film Indicating Depth
Shown Here.” “Scientist Brings Talking Film. Prof. de Forest
Here with Device Whereby Even Operas May Be Produced on Screen.”
“Modern Wizards Bewilder Edison. Watches Voice Filmed.”
“Einstein’s Relativity Theory in Pictures. Fascinating,
Ingenious and Revolutionary.”

The above list might be greatly prolonged, but it serves the purpose we have in hand as it stands. It means that the possibilities of the screen are being realized at an amazing rate of progress, that the Esperanto of the Eye, which found its alphabet when Edison invented the kinetoscope, has now become a universal method of expression fitted to reveal eventually all human knowledge to the race in such a manner that it can be sensed, if not comprehended, by even illiterates and morons. There are, of course, technical problems connected with color, depth and the synchronization of voice and movement which it may be impossible for the ingenuity of man to solve, but the year 1923 will appeal to the future historian of the movie as a period in which the screen entered a domain possessing hitherto undreamed of facilities for intensifying the potency of the playwright, actor, scientist, educator, statesman, philanthropist and salesman.

The last-mentioned beneficiary of the screen, commonly called “drummer,” is worthy of a moment’s attention just here as helping to prove our general proposition that there is no field of human activity that has not been, or that will not be, influenced and perhaps greatly changed by the growing vogue of the movie. A recently-published editorial in the New York _Herald_ says:

The power of the screen to divert trade from one country to
another is a subject that has been hitherto little discussed. An
article in _Commerce Reports_, the weekly survey of foreign
trade issued by the United States Department of Commerce,
however, declares that the motion pictures displayed in foreign
countries influence the consuming public in the choice of
markets. In fact, so great has been the influence of the motion
picture in diverting commerce to the United States that foreign
newspapers have already cautioned their film producers not to
ignore the opportunities for commercial expansion that are
inherent in the drama shown on the screen.

As Terence remarked long ago, so might the movie remark to-day: “Nothing that is of interest to mankind is outside of my sphere of endeavor.” In an address delivered last year at the University of Pennsylvania, Sir Auckland Geddes, British Ambassador to the United States, said:

It is hard to find ground upon which our civilization can
certainly and safely stand in the future. As one looks around
the world to-day and sees in country after country the power,
the direction of force, passing from the hands of the people who
have long held that power, sees wealth being destroyed, sees all
the surplus margin of wealth disappear, one realizes—not
immediately but looking forward into the future—that we have
cause to take steps to spread the appreciation of research, so
that no shift of political power can possibly take place that
will not keep it in the hands of those who understand the
importance of research.

Research! From generation to generation, mankind has been engaged in making investigations and discoveries that have constantly enriched and enlarged the treasure-house of human knowledge. But research, by which, as the British Ambassador asserts, civilization may save itself from destruction, has been hitherto an affair of specialists, not of the multitude, an activity carried on in laboratories or in desert solitudes or on lonely mountain-tops, and its results have been made manifest only to the erudite few. But, lo, through the screen the movie theatre becomes at one moment a laboratory, at another a desert solitude, at another a lonely mountain-top. Audiences of millions become experimenters in all realms of research, temporary astronomers, physicists, chemists, travellers, hunters, entomologists, ornithologists, archæologists—what you will. Erudition is fed to the masses in small quantities, and the more they eat of it the more they crave. “Know thyself!” cried the old Greek Philosopher to the individual man. “Know thyself!” exclaims the screen to the race at large, and proceeds to show to mankind the way to that universal self-knowledge that, if it comes to man in time, may protect his future from the blunders, crimes and tragedies that have disgraced his past.

The screen may well be represented to our mind’s eye as a modern Hamlet who says to a blood-stained Mother Earth:

Look here upon this picture—and upon this! I show you to
yourself as you have been—and to yourself as you may be. Look
here at the horrors and devastation, the cruelties and crimes of
yesterday and to-day. Then turn your eyes upon the world of
to-morrow as I shall reveal it to you in its splendid
possibilities—a new world, peaceful, industrious, contented,
going forward from one great triumph in progressive civilization
to another, differing from the earth that was and is as light
from darkness, as day from night! I show you the way, I reveal
to you the decision that you must make. If yours be the baser
choice, if you continue to repeat, generation after generation,
the old blunders, the old crimes, I shall not be to blame. I,
the screen, show you two roads, the one leading upward, the
other downward. You may, by seeing your racial soul in the
mirror I hold up to you, go to Heaven or to Hades. Your
journey’s end depends not upon me but upon you.

What does Man crave—what has he always craved? Freedom. Freedom from what? From avoidable ills—preventable diseases, unnecessary poverty, unjustifiable wars, preventable accidents, every ill, in short, that not only darkens his life but offends his intelligence.

The history of mankind [says Louis Berman, M.D.] is a long
research into the nature of the machinery of freedom. All
recorded history, indeed, is but the documentation of that
research. Viewed thus, customs, laws, institutions, sciences,
arts, codes of morality and honor, systems of life, become
inventions, come upon, tried out, standardized, established
until scrapped in everlasting search for more and more perfect
means of freeing body and soul from their congenital thralldom
to a host of innumerable masters. Indeed, the history of all
life, vegetable and animal, of bacillus, elephant, orchid,
gorilla, as well as of man is the history of a searching for
freedom.

At last, through his own astounding but too-often misdirected ingenuity, Man has found that which alone could remove from his limbs the shackles that have held him captive throughout the centuries. He has discovered a universal language that may conceivably bring about the brotherhood of the race and the reduction to a minimum of the ills that flesh is heir to. But with the coming of the Esperanto of the Eye the salvation of the race is not assured. While the screen may minimize eventually the evils that spring from a world-wide confusion of tongues, it can permanently eradicate those evils only by the dissemination of a message that shall exert an uplifting influence upon the perturbed soul of humanity.

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CHAPTER XV

THE MOVIE AS A WORLD POWER

_Its Enormous Audiences—It Speaks to all Men—What Message Does it Carry?—The Race at the Parting of the Ways—Have International Marplots Won Control of the Screen?—The Fate of Civilization in the Balance._

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