Edward S. Van Zile

“ Prison, the 182stake, massacre, war—what weapon has not been used by the foes of enlightenment that they might check mankind in its rise toward heights upon which the ancient, unhallowed prerogatives of a few reactionaries could not survive? And always, in some form or other, censorship has been the most serviceable weapon, both in times of war and times of peace, by which relentless unprogressives could break the spirit of those who strove to loosen the shackles of ignorance from the human spirit. ”

“ Kerr’s despondent eyes history seems to be just one devastating war after another, with no end to the infernal succession now in sight. But is it not barely possible that history, gaining from the screen a new method of exposition, a new way of approach to the soul of Man, may eventually convince the human race that there is a more sensible solution to international problems than through bloodshed?
It is through the study of history alone that Man can, in the opinion of H. G. Wells, find his way toward higher planes of existence out of the mire in which he is now stuck. ”

“ Is the screen merely a mirror in which Man looks upon his own face and turns away heedless of what his countenance might have taught him? Has the race finally found a way to that self-knowledge which might mean its eventual salvation only to misuse, as its wont has been, its newest medium for advancement? Can nothing be learned from the screen by the restless, harassed, apprehensive millions of the earth that shall make this first universal method of communication worthy of the possibilities for world-wide uplift that it possesses? ”

“ Of course, the regeneration of the photoplay must be, of necessity, a slow process. We must look facts and figures in the face and admit at the outset that the millions of Americans who daily attend movie theatres are not, on the average, highly intellectual, nor over-prudish as critics. They pay their money to the box-office to be amused, not instructed nor uplifted, to get recreation rather than rescue. A stream cannot rise higher than its source, nor can a picture-play win success if it soars above the head and heart of the average movie fan. ”

“ They flocked to see it, marvelled at its ingenuity, but failed, as did Edison himself, to realize that the world had been enriched by not merely a new plaything but by a novel medium for influencing the destinies of the race, the ultimate stupendous significance of which we, even thirty years later, can only vaguely estimate. It is amazing but true that, so little did Edison appreciate the fact that he had invented not an ephemeral toy but the only universal language yet vouchsafed to the race, he neglected to obtain patents for his kinetoscope outside of the United States. ”

“ A Lighthouse of the Past, a university of universities, a fountain of all revealed knowledge inculcated through a medium understood of all men, a Mecca for the pilgrims of peace and progress from all corners of the earth, forever adapting itself to the growing needs of mankind for enlightenment, sending forth, year after year, its polyglot graduates to carry its teachings, warnings, promises to every tribe and nation on the planet—is it not a consummation to be devoutly wished, a dream worth every sacrifice to bring within 17the purview of reality? ”

“ If it is true that there are sermons in stones, it follows, as the night the day, that there may lurk within the dynamics of the screen the possibility of divine revelations. For be it said right here, the first universal language will be capable ultimately of a saving grace to the race only if it finds a message to deliver to humanity that is not of the earth earthy. It’s the man behind the gun who wins battles. It will be the prophet and seer and poet behind the screen who may eventually bring about the triumph of mankind over the powers of darkness. ”

“ And from all parts of the world come to us the voices of observant men and women who, alive to the warnings vouchsafed to us by the recent war of wars, are imploring humanity to look not with passion but with reason at the situation of the world to-day and to take measures at once that shall drag us back from the edge of the precipice we have reached.
Has the Esperanto of the Eye, the only medium the race has ever devised for universal intercommunication, come too late to rescue mankind from impending doom? ”

“ At its present rate of progress, the cinema will soon become more powerful as an influence upon the minds of the masses than are the newspaper, the novel and the play taken together.
For the sun never sets upon the screen! Day and night, in all parts of the civilized, and an increasing portion of the uncivilized, globe the motion picture is making its imprint upon the minds and souls of countless millions of men, women and children. ”

“ The youngest of the arts, like the oldest, has confined itself practically to war and love. But the screen drama has been more reprehensible than poetry in that, in its youth, it has chosen to glorify the kind of warfare that is least worthy of public exploitation, namely, the eternal conflict that goes on between the lawless and the law-abiding, between the crook and the constable, between the underworld and the upper. ”

“ We are always face to face with the hideous fact that any slight dislocation of the bony structure of modern civilization might, as was shown by the recent war of wars, bring about its complete annihilation. Surely it is incumbent upon us, if we are not, as a race, madmen or morons, to take full advantage of any new medium or method that presents itself for the safeguarding of peace on earth, for the furtherance of good will to men. ”

“ Is it not conceivable that posterity will laud us of to-day for inventing the Esperanto of the Eye and marvel at us because we failed to make full use of it to attain that enlightenment which is the sine qua non of our race’s salvation? May not our descendants revere us for inventing the screen, while, at the same time, they mock at us for our delay in taking advantage of its highest possibilities as an ally to progress, as a defense against racial deterioration? ”

“ The screen may commit—yes, frequently has committed—mayhem, assault and battery and actual murder upon the revered form of some great masterpiece of narrative literature; but you who are well-read, you who love the “old melodious lays that softly melt the ages through,” and the tales told by the great romancers, pause before you recklessly indict a new art, groping its way toward a full realization of its possibilities and powers. ”

“ Month after month, year after year, the type of mind that considers Laura Jean Libbey’s novels admirable dominates too large a percentage of the output of the movie studios. The dime-novelish taint that was placed upon the screen at the outset of its career has been until recently only a shade lighter than it was in the beginning.
An old fight is being waged upon a new battleground. Generation after generation the so-called “elevation of the stage” has been a project dear to the hearts of many worthy men and women. ”

“ Long ago the historians said that the American Republic was the vision of John Milton in his plea for the liberty of the printing-press, set up in code and constitution. The genius of our Republic is personal responsibility, individual excellence. A father and mother must rise up early and sit up late to teach their boy and girl to think for themselves, using their intellect; to weigh for themselves, using their judgment ”

“ But censorship of the movies will be, in all probability, only a passing and more or less localized phase of our national tendency to indulge in mischievous experimental legislation. If not, however, if censorship should ever become both national and permanent, then would be sounded the doom of those emancipatory institutions which have made of our American experiment in self-government the one great hope, the one burning beacon-light, for an over-governed, over-burdened, over-censored world. ”

“ The appeal that it makes to countless millions who have been hitherto indifferent to, or ignorant of, the outstanding achievements of our great imaginative writers is a new and potent factor in the intellectual and spiritual life of the people.
Furthermore, the movie, in its traffic with the best in fiction, is of service to the man of letters who is sufficiently open-minded to welcome new contacts with old masterpieces. The screen does not merely bring great stories down to the masses, it frequently revivifies the enthusiasm of the aging and jaded book-worm for great stories. ”

“ But the people of the United States, as becomes daily more apparent, are too well informed, too sensitive to the unceasing efforts of old tyrannies to gain new victories, too jealous of the heritage of freedom that was won for them on hard-fought battlefields, to surrender their priceless liberty of thought and speech and educational and recreational choice to an outworn and discredited form of supervision. ”

“ In what I have said, and am about to say, regarding the evil influences affecting the early years of the movie, I do not wish to do an injustice to those early promoters in the new industry who refused to degrade the screen, or to treat it as an ephemeral, wild-cat speculation. There were producers, at the very outset of the industry, who builded perhaps better than they knew, and who, because of their refusal to take the path of least resistance, are now, after a quarter of a century of film exploiting, the most successful and influential factors in the industry. ”

“ Were I drawing an illustration for this chapter, I should depict Rheims cathedral shattered by high explosives beside a prairie schooner drawn by oxen and ask my readers to judge between them, to say which sketch gave us the higher opinion of humanity. Is our race to permit eventually its constructive or its destructive inclinations to dominate its fate? This is the crucial question agitating mankind to-day, and upon the answer given to it the future of all things worth while in the world depends. ”

“ Philip Kerr, for five years confidential adviser and secretary to Lloyd George, is among those who hold that we who indulge the hope that the screen may eventually act as a poultice to heal the blows delivered by diplomacy against the peace of the world are but chasing another rainbow that has at its end not a pot of ointment but a gigantic pile of dynamite. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Never before, in the history of the race, has mankind taken so deep and wide-spread an interest in the past of mankind as it exhibits to-day. There appears to be a world-wide feeling that, unless the race can learn the lessons that the great catastrophes that have repeatedly overtaken civilization teach, the outlook for the future is appallingly dark. ”

“ Common-sense, then, forces us to the conclusion that, in the perturbed world in which we at present find ourselves there is no feature of our complicated modern life more entitled to earnest consideration than the screen as historian. In schools, colleges and movie theatres, with films depicting significant episodes in Man’s past or illuminating events of to-day, a mirror is vouchsafed to this generation in which it can see both itself and its progenitors in a light that now for the first time clarifies our sight. ”

“ If you are influenced by that widely-accepted generalization to the effect that “human nature never changes” you will not be inclined to take seriously our contention that by forcing Man to observe and study, by means of the screen, the blunders, idiocies, crimes and tragedies of his past he may be forced eventually to repent and reform, to make of his future something less reprehensible than his past has been. But human nature is not fixed—it is fluid. It has changed, and it is always in the process of changing. ”

“ Civilization stands in sore need of a message of a unifying and peace-begetting nature. The screen offers it a medium whereby such a message could be carried to the ends of the earth, to be known of all mankind through the Esperanto of the Eye. ”

“ In other words, the human race may now sit before a screen and learn through the universal medium of the eye those great truths that have been revealed to Frederick Palmer by the vivid flashes of the battle-field. ”

“ To reflect on the possibilities of the motion picture in education is to regret that one’s school days were spent before this great invention came to us as a poultice to heal the blows of ignorance, but there is consolation in the fact that since the advent of pictures the whole world, regardless of age, can go to school. ”

“ The impressive flow of their narrative, their charm of style, and the tendency of a reader to forget minor details in what he has already read of a tale, have enabled the great story-tellers to commit strange, almost unbelievable, blunders in the unfolding of their narratives without seriously marring the value of their work. But when a tale-teller is employing the movie screen he can not afford to take liberties with the basic proposition that seeing is not believing unless there is the logic of the Inevitable in the sequence of the events portrayed. ”

“ The younger generation of fiction-writers are not furnishing the studios with material with which to repair the gaps made as the romances of the past are, one by one, fed to the capacious maw of the hungry screen. ”

“ We are called upon to rebuild a shattered world, to salvage what was of value in a dethroned civilization and to reconstruct the affairs of mankind upon new bases.
It is no figure of speech [remarks President Harding, in his recent message to Congress] , to say that we have come to the test of our civilization. The world has been passing—is to-day passing—through a great crisis. The conduct of war itself is not more difficult than the solution of the problems which necessarily follow. ”