Children and the Cinema
Few people will deny that the development of the cinema constitutes one of the major social changes of the twentieth century. Beginning with the "nickelodeons" of thirty years ago, motion pictures rose to popularity with amazing rapidity, until now they seem to constitute a major emotional outlet for the average American. A minority may be stirred by good literature or symphonic music, but your everyday citizen will vote for Mae West or the Four Marx Brothers every time. In his eyes they are Modern Art.
There is less unanimity concerning the moral and social effect of motion pictures. Mr. Will Hayes, of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, seems quite piously certain that the cinema is an excellent thing. It provides a cheap and readily accessible form of recreation for both rich and poor. It is an excellent medium of education. It keeps children off the streets. These reassuring statements, however, fail to carry conviction, coming as they do from the official representatives of the industry.
On the other hand, many churchmen and reformers have denounced the cinema as completely depraved and as a major hazard to the young. The disinterestedness of persons making such statements is above criticism; but their words have often been unconvincing because they were based on random impressions rather than on carefully controlled, objective, scientific studies.
It is therefore refreshing to read the report of the elaborate survey conducted under the supervision of the Motion Picture Research Council, formerly the National Committee for the Study of Social Values in Motion Pictures. This survey is popularly summarized in the two volumes under review and is published with more technical detail in a series of scientific monographs. The active direction of the research involved was in the hands of a group of cooperating scientists whose disinterestedness and scientific competence were entirely above question, men like Charters of Ohio State, Thurstone of Chicago, Shuttleworth and May of Yale, and Stoddard of Iowa, who had already won distinction in various forms of social and psychological research dealing with children.
Anyone who knows these men will feel confidence in their work and this confidence is deepened when one reads the account of the present research. Sweeping generalizations do not occur. There is a refreshing absence of emotional praise or blame. These are not men with an ax to grind. They dissect the cinema with the cold skill of a pathologist in the autopsy room. And just because they are emotional, the case they make is all the more overpowering.
A logical approach to the question of the cinema's influence on childhood is to ask how frequently children attend. This question had been raised and studied a score of times, but never so thoroughly as by Edgar Dale in the course of the Motion Picture Research Council's survey. Basing his conclusions on the reports of fifty-five thousand children, Dale concludes that about twenty-eight million minors attend the motion pictures every week in the United states, out of which total about eleven million are children under fourteen. Some seventeen per cent of the total motion-picture attendance is made up of the latter group. This fact is worth noting. Films seem to be produced primarily for adults, but a considerable part of the audience is juvenile.
The average child from eight to nineteen years old goes to the movies approximately once a week and only five per cent never attend. Boys go a bit oftener than girls—57 times a year against the girls' 46. Even young children go rather frequently. Dale found that in the age range of five to eight years the attendance averaged 0.42 times a week.
It seems certain, then, that children attend the motion-picture theater with great regularity. A more significant question is, what effect this attendance has on the child. This is a complicated question; for there are many conceivable ways in which the child may be influenced by his exposure to the cinema. He may absorb facts; he may acquire attitudes; he may develop nervous habits; he may learn new moral principles. Fortunately, the Motion Picture Research Council sponsored a considerable variety of studies on these various points. The result is a remarkably clear picture of what goes on within the complicated personality of the child as he sits squirming in his seat before the silver screen.
For one thing, he is absorbing a surprising number of facts. This is a result established by Holaday and Stoddard, who had charge of this particular part of the study. They used seventeen feature pictures of the ordinary type. These were carefully analyzed for factual items, such as the actions and sayings of the actors, as well as historical, geographical, or mechanical facts incidental to the story. It was found that on the day following the show, superior adults, such as college instructors or graduate students, remembered 87.8 facts out of a possible hundred, while children in grades two and three remembered 52.5. This is certainly a surprising fact—the eight-year-old child remembers approximately three-fifths as much after seeing a film as do superior men and women. Again, children retain this knowledge extraordinarily tenaciously. Six weeks after a show, children in the second and third grade remember about 90 per cent as much as they remembered on the day after the show.
The physical effect of cinema attendance is interesting. Renshaw and his associates at Ohio State University studied the question whether movie attendance made children restless in sleep. A device was used to measure how much a child moved around in bed at night. Motility was presumed to be a good measure of sleeplessness or at least of restlessness during sleep. Briefly stated, the study showed that motility was markedly increased after movie attendance. The investigators felt that the effect might sometimes be great enough to be "detrimental to normal health and growth".
This restlessness is easily understandable when we realize how emotionally stimulating films can be to children. This point was studied by Dysinger and Ruckmick. Their method was ingenious. As is well known, strong emotion produces physical reactions. Even though the individual is sitting quietly and, to all outward appearances, unmoved, he cannot inhibit certain bodily responses. Two such responses were investigated, changes in the circulatory system and the galvanic response. The latter refers to variations in the electrical potential of the skin, measurable by a sensitive galvanometer, which accompany emotion. Dysinger and Ruckmick used these methods in two situations, in the psychological laboratory and in a regular motion-picture theater. The latter arrangement required some ingenuity. A special seat had to be arranged in the audience. Quite considerable fear reactions were discovered by this technique. More interesting still was the fact that even at the age of nine years some children react emotionally to erotic scenes in the pictures. The intensity of such reaction increases to the age of sixteen or eighteen and then falls away. The moral is clear. Sex pictures have their most powerful effects on adolescents.
One of the outstanding contributions to the series of studies under discussion was that of Peterson and Thurstone, who studied the effect of motion pictures on the attitudes of children. Thurstone is a distinguished psychologist who had previously developed a technique for measuring attitudes. This technique was used in the present case to study attitudes on the following eight topics: the Germans, war, crime, prohibition, the Chinese, capital punishment, the punishment of criminals, the Negro. The procedure was to take measurements before and after the subjects had seen a film which was concerned with one of these topics. Any change of attitude due to the film could thus be discovered.
The result of the experiment showed that such changes, often very considerable changes, were frequent. For example, there was a marked change of attitude in favor of the Chinese after seeing "Son of the Gods", a picture selected as being favorable to that nation. "All Quiet on the Western Front" produced a shift against war. There was a change of attitude in the direction of leniency to criminals after seeing "The Criminal Code". Only a few of the films investigated did not produce a significant change.
Furthermore, the effect of films on attitudes was found to be cumulative. Two films were more potent than one. This suggests the rather disquieting possibility that great moral harm may result from continued exposure to films, each of which, taken singly, is almost innocuous. The influence of pictures on attitudes was found to be surprisingly permanent. We have seen that children attend the cinema very frequently and that the films exhibited furnish them with new information, cause restlessness, stir the emotions, and inculcate attitudes. Films, therefore, seem to be a potent influence in child life.
The most essential question remains. Is this influence good or evil? This question, which is more important than any of the others is, at the same time, more difficult to answer satisfactorily. Character is a much more subtle thing to measure than information or motility during sleep. Again, there are many different views about the value of various character traits. Fortunately, this last difficulty is not so serious from the Catholic standpoint, since we have infallible standards of conduct; yet even Catholics may differ, for example, about the desirability of war pictures. Do militaristic films teach courage and patriotism, or do they brutalize children? Many such questions are difficult to answer.
Yet, if the moral effect of the films is a difficult subject to study, it is by no means an impossible one. There are at least two approaches, both of which have been rather fully utilized in the course of the Motion Picture Research Council's investigation. One is to analyze the content of a series of average films and to ask whether this content is, on the whole, good or bad. The other approach is to study individual children or groups of children to determine) if possible, how they have been affected by their cinema experience. The latter procedure, although the more direct) is also the more difficult.
Dale made a careful analysis of the content of five hundred feature pictures shown in each of the years 1920, 1925, and 1930. The three outstanding themes were love, crime, and sex. In the year 1930 these three items accounted for 29.6 per cent, 27.4 per cent, and 15.0 per cent, respectively, of all themes. These percentages were substantially constant for the three years above mentioned, except that love dropped from 44.6 per cent in 1920 to 29.6 per cent in 1930.
One cannot, of course, condemn a film immediately simply because it deals with crime or sex. Much of the world's great literature would be condemned by such a standard. Yet it seems hardly possible to escape the conclusion that the films overemphasize such themes. It will be noticed that love, crime, and sex accounted for nearly three-fourths of all themes in the films analyzed for 1930. Surely this is an unhealthy emphasis. From the standpoint of the child, it seems to be peculiarly unfortunate. Our current radio programs are not above criticism; yet if we compare the radio with the cinema, the unhealthy emphasis on crime and sex in the latter becomes evident.
The bare fact that themes of the above character are treated is probably less important than the character of the treatment. This statement is borne out by a study of Dale's detailed results. We find, for example, that the crime films covered an extraordinary variety of crime. Criminals were not frequently attractive characters in the films; but on the other hand they were not uniformly unattractive.
In a separate study of 115 pictures exhibited in Columbus, Ohio, in 1932, Dale found that 59 pictures showed killings, including shooting, knifing, lynching, beating to death, strangling, hanging, and other forms of homicide. Twenty-two of the pictures (about one in five) presented illicit love as a goal of leading characters in the films, although in only seven cases were these characters the heroes or heroines.
We have already stated that the direct effect of the films on the child is the most interesting as well as the most difficult approach to the question of the moral effect of the films. It was an approach, however, which was tried under many different forms in the course of the series of studies under review.
First of all, there was the study by May and Shuttleworth of two groups of children, one of which was composed of children who attended the movies frequently (four or five times a week), while the other group consisted of children who attended infrequently (about twice a month). An effort was made to select groups which should be as nearly like as possible, except in the one matter of cinema attendance. Any differences found might therefore be presumed to be due to the influence of the films. These two groups were then compared according to an elaborate technique and it was found that the "non-movie" children were superior to the "movie" children in most respects, including deportment, success in school subjects, cooperation, honesty, and moral knowledge. In another study, however. May and Shuttleworth were unable to prove that "movie" children had acquired a very much larger store of undesirable attitudes, when compared with "non-movie" children.
Cressey and Thrasher have been making an intensive study of boy life in a congested area in New York City. In the course of this study they gathered some interesting material on the effect of motion pictures. They found, for instance, that delinquent boys attended the cinema more frequently than nondelinquent boys and that there was more school retardation among the frequenters of the motion-picture theaters.
Another technique is the case method. This was employed particularly by Blumer in the present series of studies. Using interviews, written autobiographies, questionnaires, and similar methods, Blumer studied some 1800 individuals, including university, college, junior-college, and high-school students, and workers from offices and factories.
The analysis of this material brings forward many interesting points. Blumer emphasizes the striking ability of the movies to dominate vividly the emotional life of a child and to transport him out of his workaday world for whole periods of time. This is less true of adults, in whom "adult discount ", that is, the vivid realization of the fictitious character of the films) acts as a control. But to the child the cinema world is a very real world and its influence is correspondingly greater.
Taken as a whole, the facts brought forward by the studies sponsored by the Motion Picture Research Council are extraordinarily impressive. They show that children are attending the movies in large numbers and that they are being influenced by the films. They show that the films deal very freely with morbid subjects. It is true, as Peters has shown, that the moral code of the movies is not strikingly lower than the average American's code; but it is certainly far lower than the standard of morality set by the teachings of the Church. Finally, the studies just reviewed show, at least with considerable probability, that attendance at the motion pictures actually has injured the character of some of the individuals studied.
These facts amount almost to a national tragedy. The cinema, this marvelous new technique with its almost unlimited possibilities) might have been a great instrument for recreation and informal education. It might have produced a great popular art, providing wholesome and innocent emotional outlet for millions to whom more complicated arts do not appeal. Instead, it seems to have done more harm than good—a conclusion which many thoughtful people have reached long ago, but which now receives more convincing proof from the careful scientific studies just reviewed.
These facts being as they are, it is natural to ask what can be done to remedy the situation. What can we do to provide the youth of America with films which will be helpful instead of detrimental to character? The answer is not easy. The motion-picture industry is powerful. It is willing to spend money to gain its ends. It possesses, in the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, a very powerful and efficient propaganda organization. It is safe from any very sustained criticism on the part of the press, because motion pictures are liberally advertised and editors are not likely to antagonize advertisers. These are serious difficulties; but they are not insuperable. There are possible remedies. These may be conveniently classified under the following five heads: 1. censorship; 2. other forms of legal regulation; 3. voluntary agreements; 4. the production or exhibition of films by Catholic, or other non-commercial agencies; 5. education. Let us briefly consider these possibilities in order.
1. Many persons, among them many Catholics, look to censorship as the ultimate solution to the problem. There is much to be said for this view; for legal restraint is, after all, the only weapon with which to deal with those who deliberately defy public opinion for their selfish ends. It is undoubtedly true that systems of censorship now in vogue help to curb some of the worst abuses.
In spite of these facts the present writer cannot feel that censorship offers a very satisfactory solution to the problem. We ought to profit by our experience with prohibition. Our Catholic periodicals rightly voiced the opinion that prohibition would fail because it was founded on the attempt, wrong in principle, to reform public morals by legislative act. Let us avoid the same error in regard to the cinema.
There is the additional fact that legal restrictions breed evasion. Prohibition brought the bootlegger. Even our present rather mild censorship has brought into existence the frankly libidinous film with a surreptitious private circulation.
The effect of censorship on the films exhibited in our public theaters has not been entirely satisfactory. Here again, it has bred evasion. Censorship has excluded specific words and scenes, but it seems to have had almost no effect on the underlying tone of the films. Censorship is a palliative, useful perhaps in cases of emergency, but a really satisfactory solution of the problem must go deeper.
2. There are a vast number of unsatisfactory features in the whole motion-picture industry which call for some sort of regulation. There have been certain standard trade practices (blind booking, blind selling, and so forth) which have so restricted the liberty of the individual exhibitor that he has not been able to secure the type of film which he desired or which the community demanded. The subject is too technical to be set forth in detail here. Suffice it to say that the trade practices of the industry stand in need of a much more thorough revision than they received in the new Motion Picture Code, approved 27 November, 1933.
The regulation of children's attendance by state law or municipal ordinance has not received the attention it deserves. The prohibition of attendance by children in the evening, the licensing of certain films for adults only, the legal provision of "family audience performances", are principles which have not been fully applied in the past.
3. Many persons have hoped to induce the motion-picture industry to set its own satisfactory standards. This hope, encouraging in theory, has not been productive of satisfactory results in actual practice.
The Hays organization has at various times announced that the industry has decided to reform itself. The last occasion was in 1931 when the constituent companies of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America subscribed to the "Hays moral code". But, as Bishop Cantwell remarks in the last issue of this REVIEW, this effort has gradually lapsed.
At other times interested groups of Catholics or others have secured the right to preview new films before release and to suggest and obtain cuts important from the standpoint of religion and morality. The most important instance of such an arrangement from the Catholic standpoint has been the work of the Motion Picture Bureau of the International Federation of Catholic Alumnae. The arrangement has not been altogether satisfactory. The industry has, indeed, been willing to make certain cuts; but it has probably gained more in the long run from the arrangement than it has lost. For the very fact that respected organizations of women were known to be cooperating with the producers has given the public a confidence in their films which was far from being deserved. This cooperation has sometimes compromised the freedom of the women's organizations involved. On the whole, therefore, it cannot be said that such voluntary arrangements have been very helpful in the past or that they are likely to prove very useful in the future.
4. The exhibition of films by Catholic or other non-commercial agencies has helped in the past. It has been common, for example, to find Catholic parishes which held regular motion-picture shows in the parish hall. This served a double purpose. It raised a certain amount of money for parish purposes and it gave the people of the parish a chance to see films which were known to be wholesome because they were approved by parish authorities.
Unfortunately, this practice has met with difficulties. The introduction of the talking film has made the use of elaborate and expensive equipment necessary. Few parishes have been able to afford the financial outlay necessary for successful competition with commercial theaters. Again, the trade is so organized that it is difficult for an outsider, such as a pastor, to secure recent films. Under this double handicap, the parish "movie" has failed to progress. The idea is worth keeping in mind, however. Some parishes, at least, can afford sound equipment and persistence will secure better films.
What has been said of the exhibition of motion pictures is true to an ever greater extent of their production. Many have cherished the hope that a distinct Catholic picture industry would grow up beside the regular industry, just as there is a Catholic literature. There seems little hope for this at present, however much we may wish it. It is a question of expense.
5. To the present writer education seems to be the most hopeful solution of the problem. More than that, it seems to be the only fundamentally satisfactory one. If people want salacious films they will have them in spite of censorship boards, codes, state laws, municipal ordinances, and lists of approved films. But if the great mass of American people decide that they want wholesome films and if they register this desire consistently at the box office, they will sooner or later get what they desire.
At least as far as Catholics are concerned the Church is in a position to start this work of education at once. We control a vast educational system. This system includes formal education from the primary school to the university and it includes a wide variety of means for informal education, ranging from the pulpit and the press, through all our elaborate men's and women's organizations down to our clubs and societies for grammar-school children.
Why not mobilize this vast series of educational agencies in the cause of wholesome motion pictures? We are certainly not doing so at present. It is, of course, true that our societies pass occasional resolutions in their national conventions and our Catholic press carries occasional statements from members of the hierarchy. But do we make a definite and systematic effort to instruct the children in our parish schools concerning their duty in regard to the choice of pictures? To the present writer, such instruction seems as definitely a part of the curriculum as any other element of moral instruction. The Catholic child ought to know that he has certain duties in his choice of mental fare at the cinema, just as he has certain duties in his choice of food on Friday. Nor should the instruction be merely negative. It should aim to encourage an appreciation of good films, which, as Bishop Cantwell has stated, are not altogether uncommon.
The Sunday pulpit is another vantage point for the good work of education. We preach vaguely about occasions of sins, but our words deal with abstractions. Why should not we, the priests of the country, assume the definite duty of guiding our people in their choice of motion-picture entertainment. We should lay down clearly the principles of theology which apply in the case of questionable films, and we should supplement this with a word of commendation when good films are shown in the neighborhood. In order to do this we should read attentively reviews of new films. We should keep in touch with our local exhibitors and make them feel that they have our support if they are willing to play fair with us, as well as our opposition if they will not do so.
Perhaps, therefore, the motion-picture problem is a pastoral problem in the last analysis. Something can be done, as has been suggested already, by legal enactment or by national movements. But perhaps the best insurance for good films in the future is an aroused and aggressive Catholic population, led by the zealous clergy, and articulate in their demand for good films—for films good in every sense, good as entertainment, good artistically, and, above all, good morally. Is not this, after all the best way to fight for the protection of our children against the prevailing low standards of the cinema?
1 W. W. Charters: Motion Pictures and Youth; A Summary. New York, The Macmillan Company, 1933.
H. J. Forman: Our Movie Made Children. New York, The Macmillan Company, 1933.
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