That Marvel—The Movie / A Glance at Its Past, Its Promising Present and Its Significant Future

by Edward S. Van Zile

The call of the wild and the rattle of a Ford car are strangely incongruous sounds, but they have been dramatically brought together of late. Adventurous dare-devils in various parts of the world are using the camera to rescue from oblivion the vanishing fauna of the outlands. The defiant jungle surrenders unconditionally to the tin Lizzie. I recently spent an enjoyable and enlightening evening watching H. A. Snow hunting big game in Africa with his gun and his photographic apparatus and repeatedly looking death in the face that posterity might possess a picture of the animal life under the equator that is destined presently to become obsolete. The lion, rhinoceros, elephant, giraffe, zebra, hippopotamus, wild buck, ostrich, baboon, camel, gnu were ours for a time to study at close range, revealed to us in their native habitat without the necessity upon our part of spending months in constant peril from heat, snakes, carnivora, fever, and other enemies which war against the white man in African wilds.

As I watched the screen that evening, my memory went back nearly half a century. It brought to my mind the picture of a boy curled up in a library chair and absorbed in the pages of Paul du Chaillu’s book “Under the Equator,” a book whose revelations of wild life in Africa subjected the author to a period during which he was suspected of being a Baron Munchausen, or, as we would say to-day, a Dr. Cook. There were skeptics who bluntly asserted that the French explorer had evolved the gorilla out of his own inner consciousness.

Eventually, of course, du Chaillu’s veracity was established; but, victim as he was of the limitations of his generation, he could not at first furnish to the public convincing proof that his tales of adventure and discovery in the African jungle were founded upon fact. To-day the explorer, arctic or tropical, returns to civilization as to Missouri—prepared to show all scoffers that their incredulity is ridiculous. Defiantly he has turned a crank while sudden death from a polar bear or a jungle elephant is close at hand; and eventually the imminence of the peril, the suspense of a tragic moment, are within the power of the screen to transmit to wide-eyed audiences safely seated twenty thousand miles away from the scene of the thrilling episode!

As the camera is more thorough and convincing in its revelations of the drama of the jungle than is the pen so is it more extravagant in its use of the material that makes the wild life of the outlands interesting to the untravelled public. There may remain untamed animals in Africa that the Snows have not effectively screened, but a fair acquaintance with equatorial fauna leads me to the conclusion that the camera can afford now to rest upon its laurels in so far as the creatures of the jungle are concerned.

Omnivorous, insatiable, the screen is sending out its camera-men to all the corners of the known and the unknown earth, to the end that you and I may learn eventually every secret that our planet has hitherto concealed. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—that’s why Man, who has become a peripatetic photographer, is venturing to lands afar. And the public is glad to confer applause, and more material rewards, upon those who mirror for us some dramatic phase of life upon earth to-day especially if, as is the case with the big game of Africa, it bids fair to pass presently forever out of existence.

President Harding, whose present exalted position gives him unequalled facilities for observing the potential tendencies of the day, has become an enthusiastic believer in the uplifting possibilities that the screen has begun to manifest. Much of what we study in our youth, says the President, might be

made dramatically interesting if we could see it. Next in value to studying history by the procedure of living through its epochs, its eras and its periods, would be to see its actors and evolutions presented before our eyes. If we are to understand the present and attempt to conjecture the future, we need to know a good deal about the backgrounds of the past. The Europe of the later middle ages, of the period just before and at the beginning of the Renaissance, could be wonderfully portrayed in a series of pictures dramatizing “The Cloister and the Hearth.” I do not know whether anybody reads “The Cloister and the Hearth” any more, but I am sure that one family with which I am pretty well acquainted would be glad to patronize a combination of picture serials and really intelligent talks with this story as the basis and with the purpose of giving a real conception and understanding of the Europe of that epoch.

Mr. Harding has grasped fully the significance of the motion picture in connection with the past, present, and future of the race. He has suggested the screening of Wells’s “Outline of History” and of Van Loon’s “Story of Mankind,” and has called attention to the possibility that, under the direction of the Federal Bureau of Standards, films might be taken illustrating the fundamental principles of the science of geology. Realizing, as he does, that ignorance is the enemy democracy, in order to survive, must overcome, and that the surest safeguard to our institutions is enlightenment, President Harding has thrown himself wholeheartedly into that growing movement which is destined eventually, if Fate is kind to us, to make the motion picture worthy in its achievements of the splendid possibilities that are within its grasp.

That potent, pushing, perverse offspring of the printing-press, the newspaper, has begun to realize that it can be no longer exclusively typographical but must become in part photographical. It is following in the footsteps of the screen in making use of the only universal language the ingenuity of Man has yet devised. A recent editorial in the New York Tribune says:

The Tribune was the first newspaper to adapt for journalistic purposes the printing of the half-tone photograph. The innovation started the rising flood of news-in-pictures which is so distinctive a feature of the American press of 1923.... Some of the events of the day’s news can be visualized for the reader simply by the printed word. Others need the aid of a picture. Others still find presentation possible in a picture alone.... The universal appeal of pictures can be taken advantage of for sound informative and educational purposes, instead of for scandal and filth. Indeed, it should be so used, as the London Times and other conservative newspapers have realized through their daily pages of pictures.