THE POWER OF THE CINEMA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 417, 20 June 1947, Page 28

THE POWER OF THE CINEMA

SAN FRANCISCO, June 5: Members of the Screen Writers’ Guild should use their wit and talent to ridicule Communism, said Mr. Eric Johnston, president of the Motion Picture Producers’ Association, addressing 200 members of the Guild at Hollywood to-night. "I want to see it become a joke to be a Communist in America," he said. He added that Hollywood should set the pace for making more Americans proud of their own institutions and principles, including capital-ism.-Cable message. g? HAT statement by Eric Johnston, ex-president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, successor to Will Hays and the most influential figure in American movies to-day, caught my attention just as I was sitting down to write this review of an important new book* on the influence of the film. It strikes me as being, in the circumstances, a singularly apposite text, because Mr. Mayer’s opening paragraph reads: "My studies on political parties have always kept alive in me a deep interest in films, for it seemed to me that the emotional, non-rational impact of films, particularly of feature films, shaped in the widest sense political opinions.’’ And later the author, a political scientist and sociologist of some note (he is lecturer in sociology at the London School of Economics), says this: "One need only study the influence of films and ‘political propaganda’ which the National Socialist Party used in Germany before and efter 1933 to realise the enormous potentialities of visualisation in the formation of ‘political’ beliefs, or of any beliefs." In the light of this, it is the latter part of Mr. Johnston’s clarion call to the Screen Writers’ Guild which \impresses me most. A little ridiculing of communism by Hollywood would probably prove not unacceptable to many people and would, in any case, be no new thing (remember Ninotchka and Red Salute?). But Mr. Johnston goes considerably beyond this and urges the use of the film to bolster up American "institutions and principles, including capitalism." True, the Russians have always done this sort of thing and been quite frank about it. ("The cinema is for us the most important of all the arts," said Lenin in 1918.) Their films have consistently sold communism and _ ridiculed capitalism; but so long as we don’t see any Russian films the point is of academic interest only. On the other hand, at least two-thirds of the films shown here originate in the U.S.A., and this point is therefore of considerably more than academic interest. Screen plays designed to inculcate certain political ideas and allegiances among Americans (which is, of course, their own affair) will also be inculcating the same ideas and allegiances among the peoples of many other countries-and that, I suggest, is very much the affair of those peoples and their governments whether or not they now approve of American capitalism, but especially if they don’t. They should be grateful to Mr. Johnston for putting them on their guard in the way he has done.

LL the same, though Mr. Johnston has told us precisely what to look for in forthcoming Hollywood films, has he, in fact, made it much easier for us to find it? Students of the cinema such as J. P. Mayer have long been convinced that the film does exercise a profound political influence but they have lacked, and still iack, any scientific method of recognising it, and thus of producing precise evidence of the manner in which, often perhaps without deliberate intention by the film producer, this influence operates. The difficulty arises largely because there exists no comprehensive analysis of the content of modern motion-pictures (Dr. Dale’s. well-known survey along these lines covers only the films of the 1920-31 period, and is’ therefore well out-of-date). Yet, says Mayer, "what is really important to the sociologist is the discovery and isolation of the implicit attitudes of a motion-picture, the general assumptions on which are based the conduct of the characters, and the treatment of the situations of the plot." However, now that Hollywood is emerging as a selfconfessed apologist for capitalism and the American "way of life" perhaps some State authorities as well as the sociologists will be interested in discoverimg just what are the salient characteristics and the standards of value implicit in the average Hollywood movie. * * % HE political influence of the cinema is only one aspect of the subject which interests Mayer in this book. It is, he is careful to emphasise, no more than a preliminary survey for a much’ fuller and more detailed study of the cinema which is now in process of publication, and from which "it will become evident that films (to be more precise, feature films) exert the most powerful influence in our lives, an influence which in all probability is stronger than that wielded by press and radio. The nature of this influence. . . . is a moral one. Value patterns, actual behaviour, the outlook on life generally, are manifestly shaped by film influences." However, (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) though the present work, as its title indicates, consists principally of "studies and documents," some of the author’s opinions, and the conclusions he draws from his documents, are sufficiently startling. For instance, he declares that the modern cinema has a mass appeal which can be compared only with the classic theatre of Athens and the Roman circus: "The modern cinema alone has a universal ‘audience. Yet where are the’ social philosophers to-day who reflect. on the norms « which guide and underlie the contemporary film? We leave it to the financial holders of this most powerful Art-industry to decide what ‘the public wants.’ The only link between State and cinema consists of purely technical police regulations" (i.e., censorship, safety in theatres). ,. . ""The spiritual dictatorship of the modern cinema is more powerful than the dictatorship of Hitler because it is less obvious, hidden in the vast machinery of the modern large-scale industry." . Sa > * [It will be particularly interesting to see whether Mayer in his next volume can reach any definite decision about the comparative influence of film, radio, and press. At present my own opinion (possibly’ biased) is that the film is the most powerful and therefore the most important medium, not merely because it appeals directy to the eyes as well as the ears of its huge mass audiences but also. because it demands so little of their imaginations. Reading any novel or newspaper story, or listening to any radio feature does require at least some exercise of the imagination; there must be some filling in of details by the reader

or listener himself; some personal interpretation is called for; and therefore some sort of individual check or safeguard does operate. On the other hand, a film will do everything for you, and unless you are consciously on your guard you are inclined to let it. But until there has been much more detailed research into the influence of the radio and press as well as of the film, no real answer to this question is possible, % FOR that matter, without fuller and more scientific evidence than Mayer furnishes here-in the form mostly of essays written by some 50 schoolgirls and questionnaires filled in by some 68 adult filmgoers-no thoroughly satisfactory answer is possible to most of the other questions which he raises; and so the actual influence of the cimema on our minds and our behaviour must be left more or less where he found it, in the realm of generalisation and surmise. Nevertheless, though I am not convinced that he establishes them beyond scien-

tific doubt, Mayer does reach two major conclusions which are worth pondering. The first is that, no matter where he ’ | lives, the personality of the average in- | dividual is shaped by the films be sees. | Instead of helping him, as he fondly imagines, to "discover" his own person-_ ality, filmgoing merely has the effect of | levelling down his individuality to a standard pattern: the world, as a result, is full of pitiful imitations of Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier. This process; according to Mayer, must. ultimately lead, and has already led, to a pauperisation of the human race which is terrifying. Mayer’s other major conclusion ("a conclusion which has increasingly hardened in me") is that "the majority of the films we see are pernicious to our nervous systems. They are a mere drug which undermines our health, physical and spiritual .... making us unfit to master our lives as they are." Confronted with such an indictment, the men who run the film business for profit will naturally, and rightly, demand to hear the evidence. I do not say that it cannot be produced; but I am not sure that Mayer produces enough of it here, or in a form which cannot be challenged, to establish his case completely. The verdict, I think, must still : | | be "Not Proven"-at least as far as New Zealand is concerned, for even if one grants that Mayer is right about cinema--going in Great Britain (the locale of this survey), conditions do vary from country to country and findings which are valid overseas cannot necessarily be assumed to be valid here also. x * * UCH a reservation is, I suggest, very necessary when one considers Mayer’s conclusions concerning the influence of the cinema on children and adolescents, and particularly his views on Mr. Rank’s Saturday Cinema Clubs for Children. This is the longest and in many ways most important section of the book, and because it is directly relevant to what is happening in New Zealand is likely to be read with special interest. The ‘author’s whole undertaking, indeed, derives from a survey of the Rank Cinema Clubs which he launched under the auspices and with the financial assistance of Mr. Rank ‘himself, but carried on later on his own account in a room lent him by The New Statesman and Nation, because the Rank organisation "had not a single room to spare for me to work in." Mayer stresses that he and Rank did not quarrel; facilities were withdrawn because the investigations were. thought to be "of no practical use to the film industry" and because both Mayer and Rank felt that the study should be an independent one, ~- As a result of what he saw and learned in the children’s cinema clubs of England, Mayer comes firmly to the conclusion that, although their constructive potentialities are immense, in their present form these clubs should be abolished; and that they ought instead ‘to be supervised by educational authorities and run under the authority of communal bodies (municipal authorities, he says, should build children’s cinemas of their own). cat Now there is a temptation, perhaps, : 108se conclusions directly to New Zealand situation. Speaking for myself, I am not prepared to do this, not because I am convinced that every‘thing is right with the children’s clubs now operating in large numbers in this country, but because I feel that it would (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) be wrong, and certainly unfair, to condemn the New Zealand clubs out of hand. solely on the basis of English experience. Here, as, with several other aspects of the cinema, local research is required; and therefore those parents and teachers up and down the country who are seeking information and a lead as to this new educational phenomenon in our midst should be prepared, I suggest, to suspend judgment until the impartial curvey of the New Zealand cinema clubs which the New Zealand Film Institute is now getting under way has been compleied. * * * HERE are one or two other challenging conclusions arrived at in Sociology of Film-notably that the film industry should not continue under its present ownership structure ("Though I do realise the dangers, particularly to the independent producer. . . . I am almost certain that nationalisation is inevitable"), and that some form of State Distributing Corporation should be set up to import (and export) those films which "the dictatorial heads of the big distributing agencies either do not like or which they think not profitable." Those suggestions open up a wide area of controversy which Mayer will possibly cover more fully in his next volume. But I° think I have said enough to indicate

that Sociology of Film is a very stimulating and important work in its field. It has some faults (including the author’s habit of quoting profusely in French and German and neglecting to translate, and his fondness for what I can only describe as the jargon of sociology). But his chapters on the history and psychology of audiences, his comparison between the Elizabethan theatre and the modern cinema, atid his appendices, are painstaking and scholarly, while his "documents" showing the reactions of children and adults to many different films, reproduced exactly as given to him, are entertaining to read and at the, same time are likely to raise the hair on the head of some parents. Finally he does, I think, make it clear that it is necessary to dig deeper than is customarily done for the cause of harmful influences in the film; and that, particularly in the case of children, a conveniently stage-managed triumph for; virtue and justice in the last reel does not necessarily put right everything which has happened earlier.

*SOCIOLOGY OF F OF FILM: ‘Studies and Documents. By J. P. Mayer "Saber and Faber Ltd., London.