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You ask for an explanation of my observations about the dangers of the cinematograph
from the standpoint of a doctor and a psychologist. Recently, I have worked intensely on
this question and carried out an in-depth study of the “cinema,” which has become the
people’s theater of our time. Like every invention, the cinematograph has its own history
of development, from its primitive form to its technical perfection. The bodily harms that
the cinema still causes us today are in large part connected with technological deﬁciencies.
The blinding and overexertion of the eyes, as well as the strain on the ear from the
uncomfortable rattling noise of the projector, have already become far less noticeable in
the modern, elegant cinemas of the metropolis, and one hopes that technology will soon
solve this problem entirely. The dangers of the cinematographic theater exist, above all,
on an intellectual level. Many of these dangers are linked to the cinematograph as such,
inextricable from the representation of more complex forms of movement through living
photography; others lie in the content of the presentation and can be avoided with good
intentions. Long cinematographic programs cause fatigue and weariness, because the
hectic succession of constantly changing images and the stimulation of the eye alone exert
an enormous strain on one’s attention. Added to this is that pleasurable excitement frequently
produced by the content of the ﬁlms. Exhaustion manifests itself most clearly in
children, who have a much slower rate of comprehension that that of adults, who are able
to connect what they see in movies to what they already know. Most educational ﬁlms are
boring to children, because children are incapable of the effort necessary to make sharp
observations and to mentally process the quickly changing images on the ﬂy. There are
physiological reasons for the fact that humorous ﬁlms and crass situational comedy
appeal above all to young people. For these are totally comprehensible, without causing
an undue strain on one’s attention; they do not require an active grasping of all the
details, because they represent incidents that already lie close to the child’s circle of
thoughts and activities. Mischief is much easier to understand than the presentation of a
tobacco harvest or of an iron factory. Owners of cinematographic theaters have long
known that crude comic scenes and horror ﬁlms are the big sellers, not educational ﬁlms.
A glance at ﬁlm programs bears this out. All “dramas” attempt to bring human thoughts,
feelings, and actions into view by means of living pictures. In every higher culture, however,
the possibilities for the more sophisticated intellectual expressions are tied to language;
psychological characterization without language is only possible in the most limited
sense. When the cinematograph wishes to depict intellectual life, it must limit itself,
in order to be understood, to the most elemental forms for expressing thoughts: gestures,
movements, and facial expressions; it must coarsen and exaggerate. That is one reason
why the trivial, the crude, the grotesque, the sentimental, and the horrifying dominate
cinematographic “dramas.” Another reason is that the large amount of capital concentrated
in the cinematographic industry produces entertaining ﬁlms in only a few places
yet distributes them throughout the entire world; these ﬁlms have to please Australians
as well as Americans, southerners as well as people from the North. In order that all
types of people from various cultures enjoy these ﬁlms, they can only employ relatively
feeble means of expression to depict equally elementary and uncomplicated aspects of
human life. This concession to the taste of the international public ﬁnds support in the
psychological fact that in the theater, primitives and children alike love strong emotions,
sharp contrasts, touching or terrifying moments, silly burlesque scenes, wild eroticism,
and fascinating crimes. The drama in cinema shares all of these things with the trash
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novel and the detective novel. But the cinematograph, with its temporal concentration of
events, has more damaging and nerve-shattering effects. When reading, we can stop as
we like, critique the trash novel, and free ourselves from its hold through reﬂection. With
the cinema, it is another story. The rapid succession of images intensiﬁes the pleasurable
tension to an unbearable level; there is no time for contemplation and thus no time to
compensate psychologically. For children and sensitive people alike, the horriﬁc subject
matter severely shakes the nervous system without giving us the means by which to
defend our psyches against these attacks. When reading, very few people have a vivid
enough imagination to perceive a three-dimensional version of the story, but cinema
places everything before our eyes in physical form, and the milieu proves favorable to a
deep suggestive power: the dark space, the monotone humming noise, and the power of
the images all put the critical faculties to sleep. In this way, the drama’s content turns into
a fateful suggestion, which has its way with the powerless, capitulated psyche of the common
man. Comic ﬁlms lack true humor; they merely offer crude situation comedies.
Beatings, marital disputes, images of helpless and idiotic drunkards, and divorce scenes
mocking the betrayed spouse tantalize the audience. Trick scenes, whereby technical artistry
lends an apparent reality to fantastic events, are generally creepy and stupid, and seldom
tasteful. Athletic demonstrations on ﬁlm are rarely vivid enough to awaken real
interest. The cinema offers horrifying examples of historical and political events from
earlier times: the terrors of St. Bartholomew’s Eve, the tortures of the Inquisition, and the
horrors of Russian justice. Realistic dramas occupy the midpoint of the program: Die
weiße Sklavin [The White Slave Trade], Die Vampyrtänzerin [The Vampire Dancer], Die
Rache des Indianers [Justice of the Redskin],1
and so forth. The shameless practice of venturing
on people’s pleasure with baseness, horror, sentimentality, and sexual excitement
is spreading.
Distorted images of suffering, poverty, and sickness foster torturous thoughts about
the injustice of the world; they rob us of our attention to the law and to state authority. In
Germany the police generally stays out of sexual scandals, but lusty eroticism occupies an
increasingly prominent place in society, and the cinema, in which children and adolescents
ﬁnd themselves more and more at home, represents a serious threat in this sense as
well. Still more dangerous, in my opinion, are the atrocious, real-life representations of
criminal life. Even if these crime dramas typically close with a moral ending in which the
criminal atones for his crime, it is still a mistake to believe that such performances are
therefore harmless. The heroic acts of the bold criminal exert a major inﬂuence upon
young viewers, one that far outweighs the force of deterrence contained in the moral ending.
One cannot judge harshly enough the lack of moral conscience and emotional savagery
informing the production and exhibition of these wretched ﬁlms with their
“famous criminals.” Indeed, the experiences of the juvenile courts show that the cinema
is ruining our youth in ever-greater numbers. With all thinkable horror, the cinema even
places images of suicide before spectators’ eyes. Finally, the danger exists that vivid presentations
of horrible stories lead to sexual aberrations in people who are especially susceptible
to illness.
The idea that the cinematographic presentations are too tasteless to have a deeper
effect cannot console us. Nothing would be more mistaken than such an assumption.
What appears as insipid and unpleasant to the aesthetically sophisticated taste of educated
people, what repulses them as grotesque, can exercise a nerve-shaking inﬂuence on
children and the uneducated. We neurologists know how often an intense affective experience
threatens the nervous health of young people. There can be no doubt that the psychic
constitution of an imaginative child, when the latter sits in the dark space of the cinema
and follows all the horrors of a ﬁlm with feverish pulses, is susceptible to a deep and
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lasting suggestion. The newspapers notify us of terrifying incidents in which young persons
want to imitate in reality the crimes that they see in the cinema.
Let me add a word about religious ﬁlms. Whoever has not experienced them has no
idea with what unspeakable abomination cinemas present the passion of Christ. Those
divine ﬁgures created by Michelangelo, Donatello, Raphael, and Dürer, which today can
be copied and made available to the public for a reasonable price, are being replaced by
the ﬁgures of the cinema!
Thus the danger exists that the Lumières’ wonderful invention, which enabled us to
render the movements and actions of a living being truly and objectively and to record
them for those who come after, will be exploited by proﬁt-hungry capitalists for purposes
that do serious damage to our people. If the cinematograph itself represents a major technological
advance, cinematographic theaters represent a serious danger to taste and propriety.
Undeniably, the most reprehensible ﬁlms have the greatest appeal to the lowest
classes of society. But if we share the conviction that the cinema in its current form not
only corrupts taste and blurs one’s sense of reality but also endangers the healthy thought
and feeling of our people, harming the body and soul of the youth, then we must seek out
help wherever we can ﬁnd it. We will not be able to do so without the help of the state.
Whoever trades on raw mass instincts always gets his money’s worth. With our efforts to
enlighten the public through speeches and publications, we will but seldom get hold of
those in need of enlightenment. Only the state will be able to effect real change. Fortunately,
it is increasingly apparent that the state intends to fulﬁll its responsibility.
Note
1. The White Slave Trade (Den hvide Slavehandel) was the title of two different Danish ﬁlms from
1910, one directed by Alfred Cohn (for Fotorama) and the other by August Blom (for Nordisk), the latter
of whom plagiarized the former. Blom also directed the Danish ﬁlm The Vampire Dancer
(Vampyrdanserinden, 1912) for Nordisk. Finally, Justice of the Redskin (La Justice du peau-rouge, 1908)
was a French ﬁlm distributed by Pathé Frères.