COMPLETE CINEMA HISTORY OF COLONY

A moving picture history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the first of its kind ever prepared, has been completed by the University Film Foundation in collaboration with Professor Albert Bushnell Hart '80 and will be shown for the first time to any audience in Symphony Hall on Monday evening, July 7. The film has been in preparation for over a year and is finished just in time for showing to Tercentenary audiences.

Three hundred years of history pass before the audience's eyes in eight reels. A score of means are used to introduce the various events. Animated maps, old cartoons, portraits, paintings, dramatization of the life of the times, are all employed to recall Massachusetts' history. And Professor Hart, whose works on American history are nationally famous, appears as the storyteller in the film, and in many sound sequences makes clear the historical significance of the various events.

The film is the product of the collaboration of all the historical societies of the state. The greatest emphasis is on the 17th century and the founding of the Bay Colony, on which all interest is centered this summer.

The picture opens with a portrayal of the founding of the earliest settlements, shows the clearing of the land, the household life of the time, and contrasts this with the life of the Indians. Each century is taken up in detail, and from many points of view. The religious difficulties, the alarms of witchcraft, the role played by the sea in the life of New England, the struggle with the soil dominate the reels on the seventeenth century.

Animated maps, and "shots" of shipbuilding and fishing, and display of the triangular trade routes, the maritime struggles preceding the Revolution, and the events leading up to the civil strife are all unfolded in the pictures of the eighteenth century. The events of the Revolution and the leading figures in it are represented in the film, and the relation of Massachusetts to the founding of the national government is stressed.