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

by Edward S. Van Zile

In other words, I have been endeavoring to explain briefly how the toy kinetoscope of a quarter of a century ago by becoming a universal medium of expression has made what men and nations say to each other in this new world-language of crucial significance to the future of civilization.

Now just here we come face to face with the most significant, the most tragically important, feature of the tremendous subject with which we are dealing. Is Man, triumphant at last over the evils that befell him at the Tower of Babel, possessing for the first time in his racial career a universal language, actually in possession of soul-stirring truths that, reaching the race at large, shall overcome the powers of darkness menacing our modern civilization? Let me repeat the concluding sentence of the preceding chapter: “While the screen may minimize eventually the evils springing from a world-wide confusion of tongues, it can permanently eradicate those evils only by the dissemination of a message that shall exert an uplifting influence upon the perturbed soul of humanity.”

Shall Christ or Cæsar, idealism or materialism, altruism or animosities, progress or reaction dominate the screen? The importance of the answer that the future makes to this query can not be conceivably over-estimated. To repeat an assertion I made in a preceding chapter, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are struggling for domination over the soul of the screen and the issue of the conflict is still in abeyance.

A timely truth finding lodgment in the perturbed souls of men might conceivably save the race from destruction. By means of a modern invention an idea, opportunely dropped from the clouds by heroic airmen behind the German lines, destroyed the morale of the cohorts of reaction and brought victory to the Allied arms. Two things were here essential to success—the message itself and the medium for its dissemination. Of the two, the message is, of course, infinitely the more important. But Wilson’s words, at that special crisis, would have been futile had they not been given wings by Wright.

Civilization stands in sore need of a message of a unifying and peace-begetting nature. The screen offers it a medium whereby such a message could be carried to the ends of the earth, to be known of all mankind through the Esperanto of the Eye. But whence shall this message come? By what authority, by what sanction, shall it force itself upon the minds and hearts and souls of all men? If the screen falls eventually wholly into the control of demagogues, a medium for enlightenment that might save the race from the threatening evils of the future will not merely fail to fulfill its highest mission but will become the most powerful weapon of those who would undermine and presently destroy existing civilization.

As an uplifting, educational, civilizing force, the movie appears to be approaching the parting of the ways. As has been shown in preceding chapters, it has vastly enlarged its scope and possibilities as an influence, direct or indirect, upon the daily lives of millions of human beings. It has of late solved the major mechanical problems that confronted it. At its present rate of progress, the cinema will soon become more powerful as an influence upon the minds of the masses than are the newspaper, the novel and the play taken together.

For the sun never sets upon the screen! Day and night, in all parts of the civilized, and an increasing portion of the uncivilized, globe the motion picture is making its imprint upon the minds and souls of countless millions of men, women and children. It has taken possession of a polyglot world and is speaking daily to the human race in a tongue that is understood as readily on the Congo as at Cambridge. But what is it saying? “Ah, there’s the rub!” Is the screen merely a mirror in which Man looks upon his own face and turns away heedless of what his countenance might have taught him? Has the race finally found a way to that self-knowledge which might mean its eventual salvation only to misuse, as its wont has been, its newest medium for advancement? Can nothing be learned from the screen by the restless, harassed, apprehensive millions of the earth that shall make this first universal method of communication worthy of the possibilities for world-wide uplift that it possesses?

The answer to these queries depends largely upon your personal point of view, upon the philosophy of life which dominates your mental processes. If you are influenced by that widely-accepted generalization to the effect that “human nature never changes” you will not be inclined to take seriously our contention that by forcing Man to observe and study, by means of the screen, the blunders, idiocies, crimes and tragedies of his past he may be forced eventually to repent and reform, to make of his future something less reprehensible than his past has been. But human nature is not fixed—it is fluid. It has changed, and it is always in the process of changing. In fact, the time may not be far distant when not only the individual but the race at large, hitherto at the mercy of endocrinal glands, will find in the laboratory methods whereby thyroids and pituitaries and adrenals and the other chemical arbiters of the fate of men and nations may be so dominated by science that human nature will not merely change with heartbreaking slowness for the better but will spring at a bound into its supermanhood.

The above fantastic possibility is not, at this stage of the new biology, to be taken very seriously, but the suggestion thrown out serves, at least, to call attention to the fact that never before in the history of the race has Man been more concerned in his destiny than he is to-day, more inclined to turn away from old methods of solving the riddle of his being, methods that have long played him false, and to turn hopefully to new teachers, new sciences, new hopes, new horizons. And, lo, at this great moment, when, as never before, Man craves all knowledge that he may know himself, chance—if such there be—has vouchsafed to him the one thing needful for a racial self-revelation, namely, a universal language.

As I wrote the above, this morning’s newspapers were making the following announcement to their readers: