But, however much may be achieved by such conscious efforts toward education, the far larger contribution must be made by the regular picture houses which the public seeks without being conscious of the educational significance.  The teaching of the moving pictures must not be forced on a more or less indifferent audience, but ought to be absorbed by those who seek entertainment and enjoyment from the films and are ready to make their little economic sacrifice.

The purely intellectual part of this uplift is the easiest.  Not only the news pictures and the scientific demonstrations but also the photoplays can lead young and old to ever new regions of knowledge.  The curiosity and the imagination of the spectators will follow gladly.  Yet even in the intellectual sphere the dangers must not be overlooked.  They are not positive.  It is not as in the moral sphere where the healthy moral impulse is checked by the sight of crimes which stir up antisocial desires.  The danger is not that the pictures open insight into facts which ought not to be known.  It is not the dangerous knowledge which must be avoided, but it is the trivializing influence of a steady contact with things which are not worth knowing.  The larger part of the film literature of today is certainly harmful in this sense.  The intellectual background of most photoplays is insipid.  By telling the plot without the subtle motivation which the spoken word of the drama may bring, not only do the characters lose color but all the scenes and situations are simplified to a degree which adjusts them to a thoughtless public and soon becomes intolerable to an intellectually trained spectator.

They force on the cultivated mind that feeling which musical persons experience in the musical comedies of the day.  We hear the melodies constantly with the feeling of having heard them ever so often before.  This lack of originality and inspiration is not necessary; it does not lie in the art form.  Offenbach and Strauss and others have written musical comedies which are classical.  Neither does it lie in the form of the photoplay that the story must be told in that insipid, flat, uninspired fashion.  Nor is it necessary in order to reach the millions.  To appeal to the intelligence does not mean to presuppose college education.  Moreover the differentiation has already begun.  Just as the plays of Shaw or Ibsen address a different audience from that reached by the “Old Homestead” or “Ben Hur,” we have already photoplays adapted to different types, and there is not the slightest reason to connect with the art of the screen an intellectual flabbiness.  It would be no gain for intellectual culture if all the reasoning were confined to the so-called instructive pictures and the photoplays were served without any intellectual salt.  On the contrary, the appeal of those strictly educational lessons may be less deep than the producers hope, because the untrained minds, especially of youth and of the uneducated audiences,