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

by Edward S. Van Zile

To reflect on the possibilities of the motion picture in education is to regret that one’s school days were spent before this great invention came to us as a poultice to heal the blows of ignorance, but there is consolation in the fact that since the advent of pictures the whole world, regardless of age, can go to school.

“Regardless of age”—yes, and, also, regardless of race, language, inherited or acquired prejudices, and the hot passions that result in man’s inhumanity to man. In other words, the human race may now sit before a screen and learn through the universal medium of the eye those great truths that have been revealed to Frederick Palmer by the vivid flashes of the battle-field.

Dreams, you say? Generalities? A vision that begets nothing but vain hopes? Suppose, then, that we make a concrete suggestion that, should it arouse interest and create discussion, might result eventually in giving to what you call “airy nothings” a “local habitation and a name.” The insuperable obstacle that has prevented heretofore the establishment somewhere upon earth of a university designed for the educational needs of the race at large has been linguistic. In a polyglot world a great central station for the dissemination of knowledge was impossible so long as that knowledge could be inculcated only by means of the written or spoken word. But to-day, as Mr. Hays points out in the address quoted above, instruction is given, from our primary schools up to our universities, through the method of visualization; and, furthermore, repeated tests have shown that students prepared for examinations by aid of pictures obtain higher marks than examinees whose coaching was confined to the media of books and lectures. It is almost impossible to exaggerate the significance of the above in connection with the dream we have taken the liberty to dream. A world university, a fountain of all acquired knowledge for the race at large, became practicable the moment the linguistic problem was solved by the Esperanto of the Eye. No longer was the vision of a race finding, as do individuals, strength and wisdom for meeting the perils of the future by contemplating the mistakes of the past a vague, shadowy mockery, destined to vanish with a return to common-sense. On the contrary, common-sense had become suddenly associated with a project that had left the realm of the abstract to enter the domain of the concrete. For what, in the name of common-sense, could make so impressive an appeal to the practical man of affairs as the perfecting of a method whereby the recurrent set-backs to progress that peoples, and mankind at large, inflict upon themselves can be reduced to a minimum or, perhaps, rendered permanently obsolete?

Let us suppose that what we will call, tentatively, our Lighthouse of the Past had found its Rockefeller or Carnegie, that several hundred million dollars were available for the establishment of a world centre of enlightenment wherein all the peoples of the earth could study what man has done in his dual character of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, is it not certain that the evil influence of the latter would lose its grip eventually upon a race that is so strangely compounded of the god-like and the diabolical? Seeing is believing. Show mankind both the glories and the horrors of the past, let each tribe, nation, race ponder its own achievements and its own failures, reveal to the pilgrim students flocking to our lighthouse from every corner of the earth both the microscopic and the telescopic aspects of history, to the end that they may return to their respective native lands inspired and eloquent advocates of a better world, and, lo, the problems seemingly insoluble to us to-day will be solved through a mass enlightenment that, before the advent of the screen, was beyond the wildest dreams of the most optimistic visionaries.

And where, you ask, shall our Mecca for the pilgrims of progress be located? For many reasons, there is but one country to-day available for the project briefly outlined above, and that is the United States. Geographical, historical, diplomatic, financial, educational and racial factors interwoven in the enterprise combine to make ours the only land in which this Lighthouse of the Past, this university of universities, could stand a fair chance of functioning successfully. Somewhere in our country there is an ideal location contiguous to one of our great cities adapted by man and nature to the needs of our experiment in racial regeneration. Where this location may be is a question to be answered in the future. Upon this site, however, when it has been chosen, can not you who have read the foregoing, and have begun, perhaps, to dream my dream, picture a vast group of buildings, both beautiful and utilitarian, within which all that mankind has done of good or evil shall be revealed, year after year, generation after generation, to the critical but hopeful eyes of the race at large? Give full rein to your imagination in this connection! Here shall be shown to our Mecca’s pilgrims all of Man’s achievements in the realms of science, art, government, industry, commerce, social betterment. Here shall be revealed, also, the blunders, the failures, the tragedies that were the price paid for these achievements.

Here may you visualize the epic tale of Man’s rise from protoplasm to power, from an amœba to ruler of the earth. Here may a Chinaman study the past of his people through forty centuries of weal and woe; the modern Greek glory in the splendors of ancient Athens or appraise his compatriots’ achievements of yesterday; the Norseman, the Slav, the Teuton, the Celt, the Anglo-Saxon, the Latin, the Jap, the Arab, the East Indian learn from the screen what his race, or nation, or tribe has done for or against—and they have all done both—the cause of advancing civilization. There shall radiate, if our dream comes true, from this great centre where all knowledge is visualized a light that shall grow ever brighter, as the generations come and go, routing the errors of ignorance and racial prejudice and making possible that for which the great hearted of the race have so long striven in vain, namely, the brotherhood of man.

Let me transpose two sentences from a timely book from which I have already quoted. Says Frederick Palmer on the last page of his enlightening volume “The Folly of Nations”: “The world of to-day thinks through its eyes looking at the screen. Where are our millionaires who seek worthy objects for their benefactions?” And, from another recently published book, “The Salvaging of Civilization,” by H. G. Wells, can be most aptly quoted the following pertinent excerpt:

It has become clear that the task of bringing about that consolidated world state which is necessary to prevent the decline and decay of mankind is not primarily one for the diplomatists and lawyers and politicians at all. It is an educational one. It is a moral based on an intellectual reconstruction. The task immediately before mankind is to find release from the contentions, loyalties and hostilities of the past, which make collective world-wide action impossible at the present time, in a world-wide common vision of the histories and destines of the race. On that basis, and on that alone, can a world control be organized and maintained. The effort demanded from mankind, therefore, is primarily and essentially a bold reconstruction of the outlook upon life of hundreds of millions of minds.

During the past eight years the human race has undergone the bloodiest ordeal of the ages and, succeeding it, the bitterest disappointment that mankind has yet been forced to endure. A confusion of tongues that made European diplomacy helpless at a great crisis rendered a world war inevitable and the lack of a common medium of enlightenment at Versailles postponed indefinitely the establishment of permanent peace upon earth. Had Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau and Orlando been obliged every morning at the Peace Conference to spend several hours, before tackling the affairs of a disordered world, in front of a screen upon which was depicted before their keen eyes the immediate tragic past and the deplorable present of the nations of the earth the final outcome of their deliberations might have been of greater value to the cause of civilization than it has proved to be. Had the Esperanto of the Eye been adopted as the official language at Versailles could not the Conference have avoided a repetition of the fatal errors that crept into its verdicts as an evil heritage from its century-old predecessor, the Conference of Vienna? Did not Wilson and Lloyd George fail to take advantage of a new medium of enlightenment that was denied a hundred years ago to Metternich and Talleyrand? Is it not even possible that had the cinema played an enlightening part at Versailles that which is of real value in the basic idea underlying the League of Nations might be exercising greater potency in a quarrelsome world to-day than it appears to be?

These queries and conjectures are put forward not for the purpose of stimulating further controversy regarding the details of what I have called above “the bitterest disappointment that mankind has yet been forced to endure,” namely, the Versailles Peace Conference. They are thrown out merely to emphasize the comprehensive fact, recognized by Palmer, Stoddard, Wells, and many other able contemporary writers, that mankind, if it is to make use of the errors of the past to avoid the pitfalls of the future, must find a way to get great truths into the mind of the race at large not through the lurid flashes of the battlefield but by means of a universal language. There is, and for an indefinite future there can be, but one such medium of expression, namely, the Esperanto of the Eye. Through it, and through it alone, can Wells, and those who believe with him that civilization may yet be salvaged, further that “world-wide common vision of the histories and destinies of the race” that has become of late the one great hope mankind can to-day reasonably cherish.