Motion Pictures Abroad

...This control will include supervision of posters and advertising, and other objectionable features of present-day films...

...He insists on a thoroughgoing solution, by which some authorized international committee will regulate the production of pictures at their source and supervise their world-wide distribution in a manner equitable to all nations and with a view to international peace...

...Moreover, many foreign governments have not only stimulated home production of pictures but have legislated percentage quotas against American films...

...The particular menace from the international viewpoint of American films in foreign lands is that we exploit them with our most indecent and demoralizing films—those wholly or in part rejected by state censorship boards...

...Fred Eastman in a recent series of articles in the Christian Century, from which some of the above quotations have been taken, calls these films "ambassadors of ill will, promoted by a government bureau" and asks, "Why not a bureau to spread smallpox...

...Moreover, no one will deny that the background and setting of the average film is altogether out of proportion because of its emphasis on wealth, luxury and laziness...

...The great menace of the film is that it gives, especially to youth, false standards of life and living, for in the movies people rarely work unless they live in tenements, virtue is generally difficult if not depressing and vice is pleasant while it lasts...

...The first, introduced by Senator Brookhart (S...

...but at least we can see that the effect must be enormous...

...Weekly it affects almost one hundred million Americans, old and young, for better or worse, for if the movie is not an asset it is a liability, since with it there is no middle ground...

...Through the ubiquitous screen America is today the best advertised nation in the world...

...It is not slackness of world trade but slackness of moral fibre...

...To quote a few outstanding authorities: Sir Philip Gibbs holds that our motion pictures are partly responsible for much of England's economic crisis for of them he says: It is the picture palaces where American-made films exhibit the indecent luxury of the idle rich and create desires and envies among the working classes and make them hate others...

...1003), May 7, 1929, is aimed at the motion picture monoply and will make illegal blockbooking and blindbooking as well as the control of local theatres by producers and distributors...

...the rawness of industrial production and business adventure, of cocktail parties, night clubs, the duel of sex and the degradation of marriage...

...Ours is an appeal to the senses—theirs an appeal to the intellect, and the sense appeal seems the popular one...

...Thus in Great Britain, 7>4 percent of film footage shown must be of British make and this percentage is progressively to be increased until it reaches 20 percent in 1936...

...Here we have a positive program to substitute the sex stimulated scenarios of America by films turning entertainment into instruction and promoting among the masses international solidarity of understanding and good will...

...In South America we have the same protests and even during the good-will tour of Mr...

...Recent observers from abroad tell us that there is much hostility against the United States and most of the reasons are obvious—unpaid war debts, our protective tariff wall, our immigration restrictions, deportation of undesirables, not to mention the reactions to certain types of American tourists—all these factors when seen in the light of our million-dollar films with their extravagant grandeur become intensified and find expression in foreign cartoons which make our Uncle Sam, a Shylock, and our nation, nouveau riche...

...It can be taken for granted that present day motion pictures misrepresent to a great degree American life, and this is its paramount menace to our civilization...

...Hughes, when Secretary of State, begged the American movie magnates to cease giving false impressions of American life to the outside world, and Mr...

...S. K. Ratcliff, in the Yale Review (1929), calls attention to the fact that in an English newspaper essay-contest on America and Americans, all the essays were unfavorable to us and our country, and he gives as the cause the American movies...

...No doubt the research studies now being conducted by the National Commission for the Study of Social Values in Motion Pictures, under the direction of William H. Short of New York City, will throw new light on the psychic and social force of films, good and bad...

...Wherever there are souls with minds and hearts, there the movie inspires love or hate, virtue or vice...

...The international menace of American films must ultimately be met and overcome at home and it is heartening to know that two bills have been introduced in Washington...

...Perhaps there is some economic jealousy on the part of European producers but the real offense of our motion pictures to discriminating foreign critics is their gilded vulgarity and sensualism...

...Recently a test was made with Chicago high school students in regard to attitudes toward nationalities derived from motion pictures...

...Sir Albion Banergi speaking for India says the impressions of America derived from our films is that it is a "land of bandits, bootleggers and social highflyers...

...Whoever and whatever wields this great spiritual power has a corresponding responsibility, and consequently if American films which today dominate the motion picture field of the world are not a power for good, they are one for evil...

...It declares the motion picture industry a public utility, subject to public control, and it provides for the creation of a federal commission which will supervise all pictures at the source of production so that they will conform to fundamental ethical standards...

...The Spanish government officially placed a ban on Metro-Goldwyn pictures until Mr...

...for proof one needs but visualize our most elaborate pictures being unreeled in some obscure spot in darkest Russia or hottest India...

...William Marston Seabury in a recent book, The Cinema and the League of Nations, calls attention to the fact that the modern motion picture presents a world problem that not only affects public welfare from the moral, artistic and cultural point of view, but involves economic and commercial considerations...

...It is no wonder that foreign nations resent our pictures with their weakness for portraying foreigners as villains and courtesans, and as for Mexicans, Turks, Negroes and orientals, they are invariably cast in odious characters...

...The result must inevitably be a tide of ill-will toward America, and a desire of Americans to see Europe...

...Already the American producers are making silent versions of dialogue pictures for foreign markets but it is obvious, that profiting by American experiments, the foreign producers will be at an advantage with films of their own language, even if they are technically less appealing...

...Even Turkey has before its parliament a law prohibiting children under fifteen years from attending cinemas and it is understood that the statute is aimed at American films...

...Other foreign countries have similar legislation, indicating that they expect to give American pictures more competition in talkies than they did with the silent screen...

...The test was made of one pro-Jewish and four pro-German films, in which the reaction after viewing the films was compared with previous attitudes, and the change to a favorable attitude was most pronounced...

...America must take the responsibility as well as the profits...

...advertised, alas, not to our credit...

...of bootleggers and hijackers, the highpowered car in robbery, revenge, double-crossings, and juvenile debauchery—mean and abominable people incessantly doing mean and abominable or farcical things, with a lawless and lunatic waste of money, and against a background of luxury and indulgence such as the peoples of the old world have known about, from this American revelation alone...

...Hammond used his ambassadorial influence to have it lifted...

...The invention of the talking picture has revolutionized the industry and it may change the international aspect of the American film—for here we have considered only the silent era of the cinema...

...May we at last hope for wholesome pictures at home with consequent international amity abroad...

...It may be said that the nature of the drama demands emphasis on the extremes of crime and vice far beyond the normal, but this does not justify vice that is attractive or virtue that is repugnant...

...R. 9986) was introduced February 17, 1930, by Representative Grant Hudson of Michigan and is more comprehensive...

...Recently an official of the Irish Free State characterized American films as "chiefly gilded trash," while French journals have protested again and again against American pictures which portray all French men as without morals and all French women as men's playthings...

...The extent to which American films have girdled the globe may be seen in the 1928 Film Book in which the percentage of American pictures in foreign lands varies from 50 percent in Czechoslovakia to 95 percent and more in Spain and Brazil, averaging about 85 percent...

...Hoover he was reminded that our pictures portray principally cabaret and wild West life, marriage infidelity and crimelinked politics...

...in others, they are censored and young persons from sixteen to nineteen are permitted to see only educational films...

...Hoover did substantially the same thing before the Association of Motion Picture Advertisers...

...working girls are always the intended victim of an employer's greed or designs...

...Europe, however, is taking the matter into her own hands...

...It seems, however, that the motion picture industry far from being officially hindered is being subsidized by our government through the creation of a Motion Picture Section in the Bureau of Foreign Commerce, which though powerless to censor or control objectionable pictures uses government money and influence to spread their miasma to the four corners of the world...

...Then he adds that the English masses daily see the crude imbecilities of wild West drama...

...Today the motion picture is as international as the light and electricity which are its chief physical elements, and it sends forth its propaganda and its influence everywhere, from metropolitan movie palaces to the shanty halls of a mining camp...

...This potent force of the motion picture is no respecter of persons, in fact its influence on the lives of the ignorant and poor is apt to be greater than on those of the learned and rich...

...The League of Nations has recognized the motion picture menace from an international point of view and^under its aegis in August, 1928, the International Educational Cinematographic Institute has been organized, "To promote the production, the diffusion and exchange among various countries, of educational films relating to instruction, art, industry, agriculture, commerce, hygiene, and social education, etc., by employing all the means that its governing body may consider...

...Today Europe and the rest of the world is getting this distorted view of America, judging us more by stories of our fast set, the "wild West" and sex than by any other thing, while we for the most part learn of Europe by her best literature of fact and fiction...

...Since this force is psychic it stirs the fundamental emotions of humans in all parts of the world...

...In some countries American-made pictures have been entirely banned...

...By the potent power of the cinema, the frontiers of nationality are to be neutralized and racial^prejudices overcome...

...MOTION PICTURES ABROAD By FREDERIC SIEDENBURG THE motion picture is today such a factor of our intellectual and emotional life that it challenges in importance the home, the school and the church...

...The second bill (H...

...It has been remarked that whereas American films are more elaborate and technically more perfect, the European films are superior in theme and theatre form...

...He says: "The solution of the problem lies in America for America still holds a monopoly of the motion picture industry...

...A writer in the Manchester Guardian says that the cinema more than anything else carries the West to the East, to the corruption of the Orient and to the disgrace of the Occident...

...Perhaps the most damaging testimony is that of Sir Ramsay MacDonald who in the House of Commons in March, 1927, deplored the effect of motion pictures on the oriental races which by representing the whites as a lewd people, scandalized the natives, a condition which he said should bring the blush of shame to the most abandoned of men...

...Shall we say that the "infidel" is protecting himself from the moral ravages of the "Christian...

...For, says he: No one can estimate, no one can even guess at the social effect of American films upon the peoples of Europe and Asia...

...In New Zealand Sir James Paar, the High Commissioner, declared that American films which overrun Australia were uniformly "cheap, trashy, and harmful...