MOVING PICTURES 



MOVING PICTURES 



THE STORY OF MOVING PICTURES 



.OVING PICTURES. It is probably 

 not an exaggeration to say that moving pic- 

 tures are the most revolutionary invention 

 since the printing press. Flying machines are 

 more spectacular, the telegraph, the telephone 

 and the sewing machine have a greater indus- 

 trial value, but none of these can rank in edu- 

 cational importance with the moving picture 

 camera. For, just as the printing press put 

 books, once the exclusive possession of a privi- 

 leged class, within the reach of every one, so 

 have moving pictures put within the reach of 

 every one a phase of knowledge that cannot be 

 contained in books. There are ideas, of course, 

 which cannot be communicated by means of 

 pictures, but on the other hand there are things 

 which can be communicated to large numbers 

 of people in no other way. 



Moving pictures can present to a chilr 1 p 

 vision of all the wonders of the universe in i 

 language which he can understand, for they do 

 not demand ability to grasp the contents of a 

 printed page. They speak the simplest lan- 

 guage known to man, a picture language. The 

 cave men of France made drawings on the walls 

 of their caves thousands of years ago, from 

 which we of to-day can read their history. 

 The Egyptians developed a picture language 

 which speaks to us after the lapse of centuries. 

 In moving pictures we have gone back, in a 

 sense, to that most primitive means of com- 

 munication and have translated it into a uni- 

 versal language. For pictures speak in every 

 tongue; in them we have a language which 

 enables people in any part of the world to tell 

 their story to other human beings in every 

 quarter of the globe. 



New Worlds to Conquer. This does not mean 

 that books have lost any of their value, but 

 simply that books, indeed, life itself, can be 

 made more interesting through the use of mov- 

 ing pictures. History and geography and nat- 

 ural history, science and industry, art and litera- 

 ture can be made more vivid and interesting by 



means of this invention. We study history to 

 .train a knowledge of the world as it was before 

 our time. This knowledge is locked up in 

 books and historical documents, in the litera- 

 ture and art and architecture of the past. Tho 

 moving picture producer can make use of every 

 available historical source to reproduce a pic- 

 ture of a bygone age and bygone peoples. In 

 one film he can present material that it would 

 take one individual years to cover and which 

 is not accessible to the average person in any 

 form. The Last Days of Pompeii is a good ex- 

 ample of such a film, and the effect of seeing 

 this picture play is not only to gratify curiosity 

 about a particular period, but also to stimulate 

 it, so that one will want to know more and will 

 go to books for this further knowledge of an- 

 cient peoples. 



Filming Textbooks. Geography is the study 

 of the surface of the earth as it exists to-day 

 and of the plants and animals and human be- 

 ings that live on that surface. The moving pic- 

 ture camera-man is bringing an intimate knowl- 

 edge of this world to the smallest country town. 

 There is scarcely a spot on the earth's surface 

 which he may not visit, .no jungle fastness nor 

 barren Arctic wilderness which may not furnish 

 materials for his camera. Much of the same 

 material might be presented in still photo- 

 graphs, but until now such pictures have had so 

 small a circulation that their production has 

 not been commercially profitable. The moving 

 picture theater has made them so. F. A. Tal- 

 bot, an English writer, suggests that most of 

 the so-called geographical films are merely 

 "travel subjects" for the theater an attempt 

 to make a subject fit both the theater and the 

 schoolroom. And this is doubtless true. Such 

 films have, nevertheless, a very great value as 

 a supplement to textbook explanation. But 

 Mr. Talbot further insists that a whole text- 

 book might be written in moving pictures which 

 would present the subject far more graphically 

 than could any book. 



