“Pictures” and Missions by F.

Signs Publishing Co. · Melbourne, Victoria · Jun 21, 1920

FromAustraliasian Signs of the Times, Vol. 35, No. 25.

“Pictures” and Missions

By F.

ONE of the saddest results of attendance at the “moving pictures” is the effect it has on the plastic but unformed mind of the youth of this generation.

These results are specially manifest in the Children’s Police Courts.

There is another phase of the question, however, which is not so patent to the average person, and that is the effect which the “movies” are having in lands where Christian missionaries are endeavouring to teach true morality. Said Miss Constance Bromley, manager of a large picture theatre in Calcutta, India, recently:—

The white woman in India realises that she is receiving less respect from the native than before, and a great deal of this is due to the indiscriminate showing of films on social and marriage problems. . . . They think of their own treatment of women and the rigid laws of custom they have to obey. If the women go to the picture theatre, they have to sit apart in a well curtained box. The European women, too, are careful in their conduct and are not seen in evening dress in public. And then comes the great contrast of the film, where the natives see white women in all sorts of garbs; on one occasion they saw the heroine of a long film, mainly garbed in bathing costume. They see white wives on the screen in compromising situations, and the result is that they get a low opinion of European morals.

Harmful as such scenes are to the morals of the “civilised” world, they are infinitely more harmful to the heathen in lands such as India, for the picture theatres are fast becoming real opponents of the work of Christian missions in heathen lands. The gospel of Christ aims at the regeneration of the heathen, while the moving picture theatres are doing a degenerating work for those same people already far sunk in the mire of sin.