MOTION PICTURES

Hokitika Guardian, 21 June 1932, Page 6

MOTION PICTURES

EXPERIMENT BY UNIVERSITY

SAN FRANCISCO, June 18,

Talking motion pictures are at the door of the college classroom. Tlie

University of Chicago will begin production shortly on a scries of twenty films on the physical sciences. Next autumn they will be the basis of study in its freshman class and will be sold to other colleges, high schools and educational groups for class presentation. Later the movies will invade every branch of study. } Robert Maynard Hutchins. 38-year-old president of the University of Chicago, who has announced several revolutionary plans since taking office in 1929, described the latest contribution “to the experimental tradition ot this university.” Four years were required to perfect it. “We are not going into the entertainment business,” lie said, “and we are not trying to jazz up education. This will be the first organised attempt of any university to find out what talking pictures can contribute to classroom work. We expect to extend it to all branches of the university, to our courses’in adult education and to many of the 2200 ether 'institutions.”

Tlie life of a plant, spanning six months, will be shown in ten minutes to the accompaniment of a synchronised lecture by a. famous botanist of the university's faculty. A delicate, expensive experiment in electro-statics, can/be filmed once under perfectly dry atmospheric conditions to the accompaniment of a verbal description by a- well-known physicist, and thus be repeated as often as desired, in any classroom. Pictures will be taken of phenomena which cannot be seen by the naked eye, and then shown simultaneously to hundreds of students, who at present are compelled to line up and take tedious turns at a microscope.