WHY I LOATHE THE CINEMA

Hokitika Guardian, 30 November 1920, Page 3

W HY I LOATHE THE CINEMA

(By Thomas Burke). I louthe tlie kineina for many reasons; one of them being that 1 loathe anything that pretends to be what it is not. Most inventions and enterprises show in 20 years a forward movement But after 20 years of life the kinema is still in the street of the penny gaff. Yet its promoters have the impudence to speak of it ag a new art. One cannot reasonably object to the penny gaff. It is quite right that the office boy and his grown-up equals, who like their entertainment hot and strong, should

he supplied with what they like. But when the penny gall claims for itself dignity and consideration as a new art one is justified in asking it to get off its perch. There is no art in this business of cameras and clap-trap. It is made by artifice and run by skilled mechanics. The “acting” of its much boosted “stars” is a parcel of inane tricks, portentious grimacing, and clubfooted movements.. When one remembers the Russian Ballet and the exquisite “L’enfant Prodigue,” where every gesture says something, one is appalled at/the work of tlie simpering acrobats who are boosted as artists. If the picture-play were truly a new art it would achieve its effects solely through its own medium ; and not one word of explanatory “sub-

title” would be necessary. But it is not a new art, and never will be. You cannot tell a story through so blunt and unaccommodating a medium as photography. I When an author, iii the course of a story, throws in a suggestion that a child is illtreated by her father, an atmosphere is created, and, if the | author has suitably conveyed that atmosphere, the reader’s imagination is clothed with it, and he is filled with pity at the half-known thing. But when moving pictures are presented to an audience, showing a brutal father flogging his child with a dogwhip, art is left out, and the audience suffers nothing of that pity; only nausea.

| But my main objection to the kinema is its effect on the child; for it is robbing the child of to-day of the exercise of that most precious faculty—imagination. In the kinema the children are shown every detail of a given situation. There is no opportunity for wonder; no suggestion -round which their minds can play. Not for a moment are they allowed to think. Every small idea is explained and illustrated until the mind slumbers. Words awake imagination. Pictures kill it. When I .was a child I could find the map of Asia as enthralling as “Robinson Crusoe.” L could pore over it, and, from the slender knowledge gleaned from my school “Geography,” could construct its cities for myself. Certainly I built them all wrong; but how delightful was the process of building, and how valuable was that early train- - ing of the iniaginatio.n! To-day, the child’s brain-play is stultified at every turn. The screen shows him everything in crude, unsatisfying reality. He is given the bare substance, and robbed of the delicious enduring shadow. As for the kinema in the schoolroom, I sincerely hope it will never establish itself there. If it does, then in twenty years time there will he an end of Imagination and Fancy. There will be no more Lantern-Bearers.' For imagination is the precious birth-right of youth: it freshens and strengthens the young heart. Fact and Reality only wither it.