"EVILS OVER-STRESSED"

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21248, 30 July 1932, Page 11 (Supplement)

"EVILS OVER-STRESSED"

COMMISSION ON FILMS FUNCTION OF CENSORSHIP A general survey of the progress of the film industry is made in the report of a liritish Government Commission on " The Film in National life," which included representatives of all types of educational organisations. Interesting points in the report are: "Wo feul that government control, such as exists in Russia, is unnatural, unhealthy, a.nd not in the national tradition. " Handled with skill the film can depict tragedy and comedy in a manner worthy of tho masters; ill-used, it dogenerates into vulgarity and tedium. The evil effect of the cinema has, in our view, been overstressed. Educational

opinion has been more ready to condemn than to investigate. There is particular y si danger lest the attendance of children at public cinema performances be regarded lis of itself a bad thing. " The film might be a most powerful inlitrumejif of union with the Dominions. The commission emphasises the value of films in stimulating the backward child. A generation of children is learning o pick up points and impressions on the screen very quickly, and this stimulant makes for original and clear thinking. Instead of helping to form the mass-mmd, the film encourages originality. Nor'does the commission insist on the young being shown only " improving films, even if these could be obtained in sufficients numbers. "The children of to-day are as much entitled to their crooks as the children of yesterday to their bandits," it states. ' Douglas Fairbanks as D'Artagnan, the Thief of Bagdad,/ or the Black Pirate, brings adventure stories to life. " A' child needs phantasy and can get it healthily from films. The saga, the ballad, the stories of old renown, were forces in education which we are in ■danger of losing to-day, though we teach mathematics better. " All too few films have the heroic quality.'' Too often they are concerned with the he-man and the good woman a pinchbeck substitute." The commission suggests _ that the *' Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers, Kipling's /' Puck of Pook's Hill," and the works of E. Nesbit are " full of stones, romantic und simple, which could e filmed in the British countryside by directors who were aware that the one sin to children is sentimentality." 1 Discussing the cinema's effect on children's taste, the report says that slapstick comedy is healthy and a delight to a child, and what is vulgar and offensive to childhood is the social comedy, where men in other people's b'ed-rooms hide in cupboards from their wives. The commission lays down the principle that "it is " the function of an efficient censorship to reflect public opinion, aud not to lead it,' and expresses the opinion that the Board of Film Censors "has tried to hold the scales evenly," and, "on the whole reflected public opinion very faithfully and commanded confidence. « As to the growth of the cinema, the commission states that it was told that there were in the world to-day• 61,551 cinemas, about half of w ®i .yy. jyy, for sound reproduction. Nearly 20,000,000 people attended a picture house eveiy wore 5,006 commercial cinemas in Great Britain.