THE KINEMATOGRAPH

Evening Post, Volume LXXXVII, Issue 55, 6 March 1914, Page 10

THE KINEMATOGRAPH

CERTAIN CLASS OF PICTURES DENOUNCED. need for Censorship. (IT miGMPH — I'REJS ASSOCIATION.) GISBORNE, sth' March. "Six years ago," said the president of the W.C.T.U.', in her address, "the total number of employees in. the kinematograph theatres in. Great Britain was about 500. They now exceed 126,000. Their wages will" probably run into £12,000,000 per annum. The number of people visiting kinemas per week is estimated at eight millions. There are about 15,000 picture theatres in America, patronised by more than six million people per day. In the face of such figures, who can estimate the power for good or evil of kinemas? While Ido not intend to enter into any detailed criticism of picture shows, I should like to ask : 'What is the effect of a certain class of pictures upon the rising generation?' There is no doubt that a good deal may be learned from films which treat of the foreign world, bufc it is an incontestable fact that there is another class of picture that demands most ruthless supervision. It is a class of picture that is a popular feature at many picture shows — coarse, clandestine love scenes, sensational crimes, bushranging scenes of the Deadwood Dick type, and murders. These are undoubtedly harmful in their effect on the minds of the young, for they create a most, unwholesome appetite and invariably lead to unwholesome moral decrepitude. A perusal of the daily advertisements for the kinema will convince yon that the programmes are largely blood-curdling and sensational, calculated to hold spellbound, and. as one advertisement recently put it, with 'thrills enough to suit the most exacting.' It is a matter for .amazement that, with parents fully aware of this, there should be such apparent- indifference as to the class of entertainment which their children attend, [t might be well if, in New Zealand, some responsible body was created to supervise films bofoie they appear in public. It could do the managements ikj harm, while it would exercise h moat beuciicial effect upon the community.,"