PEDIATRICS Vol. 37 No. 1 January 1966, pp. 182-194
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III. THE MOTION PICTURE IN THE PRESERVATION OF NONRECURRING ETHNOENVIRONMENTAL DATA

WERE THE TECHNIQUES of motion picture recording available to Herodotus on his travels, to Xenophon during his march with the Greek Ten Thousand, to the chroniclers who sailed with Magellan and Captain Cook, or to Darwin on the Beagle, or to those who marched with Cortez and Pizarro, what sort of cinema record would be today of most value from these great voyages? With this question in mind we have formulated a research film concept to guide the recording, preserving, and retrieval of the maximum information possible using cinema film. This concept has developed in the course of our studies of childhood in rapidly disappearing primitive cultures and our attempts to use cinema film as a tool in the study of the programming of the human nervous system. It is serving the incipient discipline we are calling the cybernetics of human development. The Film Archive for the Study of Child Growth and Development and Disease Patterns in Primitive Cultures has been developed to make possible the repeated reference to data from nonrecurring past events in primitive childhood in accordance with our research film concept.

Few investigators would dispute the great value of motion pictures of past events as suggested by our anachronistic conjecture above, and such records would certainly now be used for virtually endless scientific and historical inquiry. Most investigators, however, would not be completely satisfied with a didactic or demonstrative production edited or organized according to the philosophical or scientific whims or tastes of the time or with only that footage selected and assembled according to what best supported the documentor's theses or concept of aesthetic excellence.