With the movie makers

by Myron M. Stearns

Motion pictures made in one country may be shown in any other, and find appreciation. Films produced in America may go to all the countries of the world, and do.

But America is not the only country producing motion pictures. French films or German, or Italian, or English, or Scandinavian, or any other, may also be shown in any of the countries of the globe, including America.

To be sure, there are changes that have to be made, here and there. The leaders or captions—now usually called titles in this country—have to be translated into the required language; sometimes the action in the pictures has to be cut to meet the requirements of differing customs and conventions. And the audiences of the globe do not all like the same things, or see them in the same way.

A missionary returning from one of the island groups in the South Seas recently told me of the first “movie-palace” to be established in his vicinity. “Shows” were given only at irregular intervals, and were talked of for days in advance, and attended like country fairs, by all the villagers able to walk, from miles around.

As the job of translating the titles on the film into the native dialect would be altogether too expensive for such limited audiences, a native interpreter, able to guess at the meaning of the foreign titles here and there, stood in front of the screen and told the story as he imagined it ought to be, as it flickered along. The highly emotional audience was always greatly excited, and the enthusiasm and shouts of the natives gradually grew louder and louder, as the action progressed, often drowning out altogether the shouted explanations of the interpreter. Not infrequently the excitement grew almost into hysteria, so that it was nothing unusual for the show to wind up in a free-for-all fight.

But the most interesting thing was the attitude of the native audience toward the characters of the photoplay.

Their virtues were not the civilized virtues, nor were their vices those of the film producers, so that they saw the hero as a good-for-nothing, and the villain, often enough, as a hero. When the melodramatic “heavy” pulled out his knife and plunged it into the trusty guard, they cheered him on, and when he next dragged the beautiful heroine into his refuge in the hills by the hair of her head, they were more enthusiastic still. But when the hero appeared on the scene in the nick of time, to help the girl escape and foil the villain’s plans, they hissed like good fellows, and nearly broke up the show.

Let us see for a moment just what the world market in motion pictures means to America.

Not in dollars and cents, because, alone, the money side of the picture industry is neither exceptionally important nor particularly interesting. The film industry is now, I believe, the fifth largest in the country, and its exports and imports run to millions of dollars annually. American pictures for the whole world would mean more dollars coming our way, and more prosperity in this country; but that is neither more nor less than can be said of half a dozen other industries. Money is not the only thing we need to make America the greatest country in the world.

Indirectly, the movies mean more, even from the money standpoint, than the tremendous direct returns from the industry itself give any idea of. The citizens of Rio de Janeiro, let us say, watch American films and become acquainted with the interiors of American rooms, American furniture and all the rest. When they have to furnish a home of their own those Brazilians have to choose, let us say, between German-made furniture and American. If they’re already accustomed to the American designs and styles, through seeing them on the screen, they will take them, unhesitatingly, in preference to the German. For what people have already accepted unconsciously as a standard—what they see others using in countries they look up to—inevitably appeals to them for their own use. And as with furniture, so with all the host of other things American, manufactured for export as well as home use.