PART II

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THE PHOTOPLAY

A PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDY

BY

HUGO MÜNSTERBERG

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

NEW YORK LONDON

1916

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER PAGE

1. THE OUTER DEVELOPMENT OF THE MOVING PICTURES 3

2. THE INNER DEVELOPMENT OF THE MOVING PICTURES 21

PART I. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE PHOTOPLAY

3. DEPTH AND MOVEMENT 44

4. ATTENTION 72

5. MEMORY AND IMAGINATION 92

6. EMOTIONS 112

PART II. THE ESTHETICS OF THE PHOTOPLAY

7. THE PURPOSE OF ART 133

8. THE MEANS OF THE VARIOUS ARTS 155

9. THE MEANS OF THE PHOTOPLAY 170

10. THE DEMANDS OF THE PHOTOPLAY 191

11. THE FUNCTION OF THE PHOTOPLAY 215

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I

THE OUTER DEVELOPMENT OF THE MOVING PICTURES

It is arbitrary to say where the development of the moving pictures

began and it is impossible to foresee where it will lead. What invention

marked the beginning? Was it the first device to introduce movement into

the pictures on a screen? Or did the development begin with the first

photographing of various phases of moving objects? Or did it start with

the first presentation of successive pictures at such a speed that the

impression of movement resulted? Or was the birthday of the new art when

the experimenters for the first time succeeded in projecting such

rapidly passing pictures on a wall? If we think of the moving pictures

as a source of entertainment and esthetic enjoyment, we may see the germ

in that camera obscura which allowed one glass slide to pass before

another and thus showed the railway train on one slide moving over the

bridge on the other glass plate. They were popular half a century ago.

On the other hand if the essential feature of the moving pictures is the

combination of various views into one connected impression, we must look

back to the days of the phenakistoscope which had scientific interest

only; it is more than eighty years since it was invented. In America,

which in most recent times has become the classical land of the moving

picture production, the history may be said to begin with the days of

the Chicago Exposition, 1893, when Edison exhibited his kinetoscope. The

visitor dropped his nickel into a slot, the little motor started, and

for half a minute he saw through the magnifying glass a girl dancing or

some street boys fighting. Less than a quarter of a century later twenty

thousand theaters for moving pictures are open daily in the United

States and the millions get for their nickel long hours of enjoyment. In

Edison's small box into which only one at a time could peep through the

hole, nothing but a few trite scenes were exhibited. In those twenty

thousand theaters which grew from it all human passions and emotions

find their stage, and whatever history reports or science demonstrates

or imagination invents comes to life on the screen of the picture

palace.

Yet this development from Edison's half-minute show to the "Birth of a

Nation" did not proceed on American soil. That slot box, after all, had

little chance for popular success. The decisive step was taken when

pictures of the Edison type were for the first time thrown on a screen

and thus made visible to a large audience. That step was taken 1895 in

London. The moving picture theater certainly began in England. But there

was one source of the stream springing up in America, which long

preceded Edison: the photographic efforts of the Englishman Muybridge,

who made his experiments in California as early as 1872. His aim was to

have photographs of various phases of a continuous movement, for

instance of the different positions which a trotting horse is passing

through. His purpose was the analysis of the movement into its component

parts, not the synthesis of a moving picture from such parts. Yet it is

evident that this too was a necessary step which made the later

triumphs possible.

If we combine the scientific and the artistic efforts of the new and the

old world, we may tell the history of the moving pictures by the

following dates and achievements. In the year 1825 a Doctor Roget

described in the "Philosophical Transactions" an interesting optical

illusion of movement, resulting, for instance, when a wheel is moving

along behind a fence of upright bars. The discussion was carried much

further when it was taken up a few years later by a master of the craft,

by Faraday. In the _Journal of the Royal Institute of Great Britain_ he

writes in 1831 "on a peculiar class of optical deceptions." He describes

there a large number of subtle experiments in which cogwheels of

different forms and sizes were revolving with different degrees of

rapidity and in different directions. The eye saw the cogs of the moving

rear wheel through the passing cogs of the front wheel. The result is

the appearance of movement effects which do not correspond to an

objective motion. The impression of backward movement can arise from

forward motions, quick movement from slow, complete rest from

combinations of movements. For the first time the impression of movement

was synthetically produced from different elements. For those who fancy

that the "new psychology" with its experimental analysis of

psychological experiences began only in the second half of the

nineteenth century or perhaps even with the foundation of the

psychological laboratories, it might be enlightening to study those

discussions of the early thirties.

The next step leads us much further. In the fall of 1832 Stampfer in

Germany and Plateau in France, independent of each other, at the same

time designed a device by which pictures of objects in various phases of

movement give the impression of continued motion. Both secured the

effect by cutting fine slits in a black disk in the direction of the

radius. When the disk is revolved around its center, these slits pass

the eye of the observer. If he holds it before a mirror and on the rear

side of the disk pictures are drawn corresponding to the various slits,

the eye will see one picture after another in rapid succession at the

same place. If these little pictures give us the various stages of a

movement, for instance a wheel with its spokes in different positions,

the whole series of impressions will be combined into the perception of

a revolving wheel. Stampfer called them the stroboscopic disks, Plateau

the phenakistoscope. The smaller the slits, the sharper the pictures.

Uchatius in Vienna constructed an apparatus as early as 1853 to throw

these pictures of the stroboscopic disks on the wall. Horner followed

with the daedaleum, in which the disk was replaced by a hollow cylinder

which had the pictures on the inside and holes to watch them from

without while the cylinder was in rotation. From this was developed the

popular toy which as the zoötrope or bioscope became familiar

everywhere. It was a revolving black cylinder with vertical slits, on

the inside of which paper strips with pictures of moving objects in

successive phases were placed. The clowns sprang through the hoop and

repeated this whole movement with every new revolution of the cylinder.

In more complex instruments three sets of slits were arranged above one

another. One set corresponded exactly to the distances of the pictures

and the result was that the moving object appeared to remain on the

same spot. The second brought the slits nearer together; then the

pictures necessarily produced an effect as if the man were really moving

forward while he performed his tricks. In the third set the slits were

further distant from one another than the pictures, and the result was

that the picture moved backward.

The scientific principle which controls the moving picture world of

today was established with these early devices. Isolated pictures

presented to the eye in rapid succession but separated by interruptions

are perceived not as single impressions of different positions, but as a

continuous movement. But the pictures of movements used so far were

drawn by the pen of the artist. Life showed to him everywhere continuous

movements; his imagination had to resolve them into various

instantaneous positions. He drew the horse race for the zoötrope, but

while the horses moved forward, nobody was able to say whether the

various pictures of their legs really corresponded to the stages of the

actual movements. Thus a true development of the stroboscopic effects

appeared dependent upon the fixation of the successive stages. This was

secured in the early seventies, but to make this progress possible the

whole wonderful unfolding of the photographer's art was needed, from the

early daguerreotype, which presupposed hours of exposure, to the

instantaneous photograph which fixes the picture of the outer world in a

small fraction of a second. We are not concerned here with this

technical advance, with the perfection of the sensitive surface of the

photographic plate. In 1872 the photographer's camera had reached a

stage at which it was possible to take snapshot pictures. But this alone

would not have allowed the photographing of a real movement with one

camera, as the plates could not have been exchanged quickly enough to

catch the various phases of a short motion.

Here the work of Muybridge sets in. He had a black horse trot or gallop

or walk before a white wall, passing twenty-four cameras. On the path of

the horse were twenty-four threads which the horse broke one after

another and each one released the spring which opened the shutter of an

instrument. The movement of the horse was thus analyzed into twenty-four

pictures of successive phases; and for the first time the human eye saw

the actual positions of a horse's legs during the gallop or trot. It is

not surprising that these pictures of Muybridge interested the French

painters when he came to Paris, but fascinated still more the great

student of animal movements, the physiologist Marey. He had contributed

to science many an intricate apparatus for the registration of movement

processes. "Marey's tambour" is still the most useful instrument in

every physiological and psychological laboratory, whenever slight

delicate movements are to be recorded. The movement of a bird's wings

interested him especially, and at his suggestion Muybridge turned to the

study of the flight of birds. Flying pigeons were photographed in

different positions, each picture taken in a five-hundredth part of a

second.

But Marey himself improved the method. He made use of an idea which the

astronomer Jannsen had applied to the photographing of astronomical

processes. Jannsen photographed, for instance, the transit of the planet

Venus across the sun in December, 1874, on a circular sensitized plate

which revolved in the camera. The plate moved forward a few degrees

every minute. There was room in this way to have eighteen pictures of

different phases of the transit on the marginal part of the one plate.

Marey constructed the apparatus for the revolving disk so that the

intervals instead of a full minute became only one-twelfth of a second.

On the one revolving disk twenty-five views of the bird in motion could

be taken. This brings us to the time of the early eighties. Marey

remained indefatigable in improving the means for quick successive

snapshots with the same camera. Human beings were photographed by him in

white clothes on a black background. When ten pictures were taken in a

second the subtlest motions in their jumping or running could be

disentangled. The leading aim was still decidedly a scientific

understanding of the motions, and the combination of the pictures into a

unified impression of movement was not the purpose. Least of all was

mere amusement intended.

About that time Anschütz in Germany followed the Muybridge suggestions

with much success and gave to this art of photographing the movement of

animals and men a new turn. He not only photographed the successive

stages, but printed them on a long strip which was laid around a

horizontal wheel. This wheel is in a dark box and the eye can see the

pictures on the paper strip only at the moment when the light of a

Geissler's tube flashes up. The wheel itself has such electric contacts

that the intervals between two flashes correspond to the time which is

necessary to move the wheel from one picture to the next. However

quickly the wheel may be revolved the lights follow one another with the

same rapidity with which the pictures replace one another. During the

movement when one picture moves away and another approaches the center

of vision all is dark. Hence the eye does not see the changes but gets

an impression as if the picture remained at the same spot, only moving.

The bird flaps its wings and the horse trots. It was really a perfect

kinetoscopic instrument. Yet its limitations were evident. No movements

could be presented but simple rhythmical ones, inasmuch as after one

revolution of the wheel the old pictures returned. The marching men

appeared very lifelike; yet they could not do anything but march on and

on, the circumference of the wheel not allowing more room than was

needed for about forty stages of the moving legs from the beginning to

the end of the step.

If the picture of a motion was to go beyond these simplest rhythmical

movements, if persons in action were really to be shown, it would be

necessary to have a much larger number of pictures in instantaneous

illumination. The wheel principle would have to be given up and a long

strip with pictures would be needed. That presupposed a correspondingly

long set of exposures and this demand could not be realized as long as

the pictures were taken on glass plates. But in that period experiments

were undertaken on many sides to substitute a more flexible transparent

material for the glass. Translucent papers, gelatine, celluloid, and

other substances were tried. It is well known that the invention which

was decisive was the film which Eastman in Rochester produced. With it

came the great mechanical improvement, the use of the two rollers. One

roller holds the long strip of film which is slowly wound over the

second, the device familiar to every amateur photographer today. With

film photography was gained the possibility not only of securing a much

larger number of pictures than Marey or Anschütz made with their

circular arrangements, but of having these pictures pass before the eye

illumined by quickly succeeding flashlights for any length of time.

Moreover, instead of the quick illumination the passing pictures might

be constantly lighted. In that case slits must pass by in the opposite

direction so that each picture is seen for a moment only, as if it were

at rest. This idea is perfectly realized in Edison's machine.

In Edison's kinetoscope a strip of celluloid film forty-five feet in

length with a series of pictures each three-quarters of an inch long

moved continuously over a series of rolls. The pictures passed a

magnifying lens, but between the lens and the picture was a revolving

shutter which moved with a speed carefully adjusted to the film. The

opening in the shutter was opposite the lens at the moment when the film

had moved on three-quarters of an inch. Hence the eye saw not the

passing of the pictures but one picture after another at the same spot.

Pretty little scenes could now be acted in half a minute's time, as more

than six hundred pictures could be used. The first instrument was built

in 1890, and soon after the Chicago World's Fair it was used for

entertainment all over the world. The wheel of Anschütz had been

widespread too; yet it was considered only as a half-scientific

apparatus. With Edison's kinetoscope the moving pictures had become a

means for popular amusement and entertainment, and the appetite of

commercialism was whetted. At once efforts to improve on the Edison

machine were starting everywhere, and the adjustment to the needs of the

wide public was in the foreground.

Crowning success came almost at the same time to Lumière and Son in

Paris and to Paul in London. They recognized clearly that the new scheme

could not become really profitable on a large scale as long as only one

person at a time could see the pictures. Both the well-known French

manufacturers of photographic supplies and the English engineer

considered the next step necessary to be the projection of the films

upon a large screen. Yet this involved another fundamental change. In

the kinetoscope the films passed by continuously. The time of the

exposure through the opening in the revolving shutter had to be

extremely short in order to give distinct pictures. The slightest

lengthening would make the movement of the film itself visible and

produce a blurring effect. This time was sufficient for the seeing of

the picture; it could not be sufficient for the greatly enlarged view on

the wall. Too little light passed through to give a distinct image.

Hence it became essential to transform the continuous movement of the

film into an intermittent one. The strip of film must be drawn before

the lens by jerking movements so that the real motion of the strip would

occur in the periods in which the shutter was closed, while it was at

rest for the fraction of time in which the light of the projection

apparatus passed through.

Both Lumière and Paul overcame this difficulty and secured an

intermittent pushing forward of the pictures for three-quarters of an

inch, that is for the length of the single photograph. In the spring of

1895 Paul's theatrograph or animatograph was completed, and in the

following year he began his engagement at the Alhambra Theater, where

the novelty was planned as a vaudeville show for a few days but stayed

for many a year, since it proved at once an unprecedented success. The

American field was conquered by the Lumière camera. The Eden Musée was

the first place where this French kinematograph was installed. The

enjoyment which today one hundred and twenty-five thousand moving

picture theaters all over the globe bring to thirty million people daily

is dependent upon Lumière's and Paul's invention. The improvements in

the technique of taking the pictures and of projecting them on the

screen are legion, but the fundamental features have not been changed.

Yes; on the whole the development of the last two decades has been a

conservative one. The fact that every producer tries to distribute his

films to every country forces a far-reaching standardization on the

entire moving picture world. The little pictures on the film are still

today exactly the same size as those which Edison used for his

kinetoscope and the long strips of film are still gauged by four round

perforations at the side of each to catch the sprockets which guide the

film.

As soon as the moving picture show had become a feature of the

vaudeville theater, the longing of the crowd for ever new entertainments

and sensations had to be satisfied if the success was to last. The mere

enjoyment of the technical wonder as such necessarily faded away and the

interest could be kept up only if the scenes presented on the screen

became themselves more and more enthralling. The trivial acts played in

less than a minute without any artistic setting and without any

rehearsal or preparation soon became unsatisfactory. The grandmother who

washes the baby and even the street boy who plays a prank had to be

replaced by quick little comedies. Stages were set up; more and more

elaborate scenes were created; the film grew and grew in length.

Competing companies in France and later in the United States, England,

Germany and notably in Italy developed more and more ambitious

productions. As early as 1898 the Eden Musée in New York produced an

elaborate setting of the Passion Play in nearly fifty thousand pictures,

which needed almost an hour for production. The personnel on the stage

increased rapidly, huge establishments in which any scenery could be

built up sprang into being. But the inclosed scene was often not a

sufficient background; the kinematographic camera was brought to

mountains and seashore, and soon to the jungles of Africa or to Central

Asia if the photoplay demanded exciting scenes on picturesque

backgrounds. Thousands of people entered into the battle scenes which

the historical drama demanded. We stand today in the midst of this

external growth of which no one dreamed in the days of the kinetoscope.

Yet this technical progress and this tremendous increase of the

mechanical devices for production have their true meaning in the inner

growth which led from trite episodes to the height of tremendous action,

from trivial routine to a new and most promising art.

CHAPTER II

THE INNER DEVELOPMENT OF THE MOVING PICTURES

It was indeed not an external technical advance only which led from

Edison's half a minute show of the little boy who turns on the hose to

the "Daughter of Neptune," or "Quo Vadis," or "Cabiria," and many

another performance which fills an evening. The advance was first of all

internal; it was an esthetic idea. Yet even this does not tell the whole

story of the inner growth of the moving pictures, as it points only to

the progress of the photoplay. It leaves out of account the fact that

the moving pictures appeal not merely to the imagination, but that they

bring their message also to the intellect. They aim toward instruction

and information. Just as between the two covers of a magazine artistic

stories stand side by side with instructive essays, scientific

articles, or discussions of the events of the day, the photoplay is

accompanied by a kinematoscopic rendering of reality in all its aspects.

Whatever in nature or in social life interests the human understanding

or human curiosity comes to the mind of the spectator with an

incomparable intensity when not a lifeless photograph but a moving

picture brings it to the screen.

The happenings of the day afford the most convenient material, as they

offer the chance for constantly changing programmes and hence the ideal

conditions for a novelty seeking public. No actors are needed; the

dramatic interest is furnished by the political and social importance of

the events. In the early days when the great stages for the production

of photoplays had not been built, the moving picture industry relied in

a much higher degree than today on this supply from the surrounding

public life. But while the material was abundant, it soon became rather

insipid to see parades and processions and orators, and even where the

immediate interest seemed to give value to the pictures it was for the

most part only a local interest and faded away after a time. The

coronation of the king or the inauguration of the president, the

earthquake in Sicily, the great Derby, come, after all, too seldom.

Moreover through the strong competition only the first comer gained the

profits and only the most sensational dashes of kinematographers with

the reporter's instinct could lead to success in the eyes of the spoiled

moving picture audiences.

Certainly the history of these enterprises is full of adventures worthy

to rank with the most daring feats in the newspaper world. We hear that

when the investiture of the Prince of Wales was performed at Carnarvon

at four o'clock in the afternoon, the public of London at ten o'clock of

the same day saw the ceremony on the screen in a moving picture twelve

minutes in length. The distance between the two places is two hundred

miles. The film was seven hundred and fifty feet long. It had been

developed and printed in a special express train made up of long freight

cars transformed into dark rooms and fitted with tanks for the

developing and washing and with a machine for printing and drying. Yet

on the whole the current events were slowly losing ground even in

Europe, while America had never given such a large share of interest to

this rival of the newspaper. It is claimed that the producers in America

disliked these topical pictures because the accidental character of the

events makes the production irregular and interferes too much with the

steady preparation of the photoplays. Only when the war broke out, the

great wave of excitement swept away this apathy. The pictures from the

trenches, the marches of the troops, the life of the prisoners, the

movements of the leaders, the busy life behind the front, and the action

of the big guns absorbed the popular interest in every corner of the

world. While the picturesque old-time war reporter has almost

disappeared, the moving picture man has inherited all his courage,

patience, sensationalism, and spirit of adventure.

A greater photographic achievement, however, than the picturing of the

social and historic events was the marvelous success of the

kinematograph with the life of nature. No explorer in recent years has

crossed distant lands and seas without a kinematographic outfit. We

suddenly looked into the most intimate life of the African wilderness.

There the elephants and giraffes and monkeys passed to the waterhole,

not knowing that the moving picture man was turning his crank in the top

of a tree. We followed Scott and Shackleton into the regions of eternal

ice, we climbed the Himalayas, we saw the world from the height of the

aëroplane, and every child in Europe knows now the wonders of Niagara.

But the kinematographer has not sought nature only where it is gigantic

or strange; he follows its path with no less admirable effect when it is

idyllic. The brook in the woods, the birds in their nest, the flowers

trembling in the wind have brought their charm to the delighted eye more

and more with the progress of the new art.

But the wonders of nature which the camera unveils to us are not limited

to those which the naked eye can follow. The technical progress led to

the attachment of the microscope. After overcoming tremendous

difficulties, the scientists succeeded in developing a microscope

kinematography which multiplies the dimensions a hundred thousand times.

We may see on the screen the fight of the bacteria with the

microscopically small blood corpuscles in the blood stream of a diseased

animal. Yes, by the miracles of the camera we may trace the life of

nature even in forms which no human observation really finds in the

outer world. Out there it may take weeks for the orchid to bud and

blossom and fade; in the picture the process passes before us in a few

seconds. We see how the caterpillar spins its cocoon and how it breaks

it and how the butterfly unfolds its wings; and all which needed days

and months goes on in a fraction of a minute. New interest for geography

and botany and zoölogy has thus been aroused by these developments,

undreamed of in the early days of the kinematograph, and the scientists

themselves have through this new means of technique gained unexpected

help for their labors.

The last achievement in this universe of photoknowledge is "the magazine

on the screen." It is a bold step which yet seemed necessary in our day

of rapid kinematoscopic progress. The popular printed magazines in

America had their heydey in the muckraking period about ten years ago.

Their hold on the imagination of the public which wants to be informed

and entertained at the same time has steadily decreased, while the power

of the moving picture houses has increased. The picture house ought

therefore to take up the task of the magazines which it has partly

displaced. The magazines give only a small place to the news of the day,

a larger place to articles in which scholars and men of public life

discuss significant problems. Much American history in the last two

decades was deeply influenced by the columns of the illustrated

magazines. Those men who reached the millions by such articles cannot

overlook the fact--they may approve or condemn it--that the masses of

today prefer to be taught by pictures rather than by words. The

audiences are assembled anyhow. Instead of feeding them with mere

entertainment, why not give them food for serious thought? It seemed

therefore a most fertile idea when the "Paramount Pictograph" was

founded to carry intellectual messages and ambitious discussions into

the film houses. Political and economic, social and hygienic, technical

and industrial, esthetic and scientific questions can in no way be

brought nearer to the grasp of millions. The editors will have to take

care that the discussions do not degenerate into one-sided propaganda,

but so must the editors of a printed magazine. Among the scientists the

psychologist may have a particular interest in this latest venture of

the film world. The screen ought to offer a unique opportunity to

interest wide circles in psychological experiments and mental tests and

in this way to spread the knowledge of their importance for vocational

guidance and the practical affairs of life.

Yet that power of the moving pictures to supplement the school room and

the newspaper and the library by spreading information and knowledge is,

after all, secondary to their general task, to bring entertainment and

amusement to the masses. This is the chief road on which the forward

march of the last twenty years has been most rapid. The theater and the

vaudeville and the novel had to yield room and ample room to the play of

the flitting pictures. What was the real principle of the inner

development on this artistic side? The little scenes which the first

pictures offered could hardly have been called plays. They would have

been unable to hold the attention by their own contents. Their only

charm was really the pleasure in the perfection with which the apparatus

rendered the actual movements. But soon touching episodes were staged,

little humorous scenes or melodramatic actions were played before the

camera, and the same emotions stirred which up to that time only the

true theater play had awakened. The aim seemed to be to have a real

substitute for the stage. The most evident gain of this new scheme was

the reduction of expenses. One actor is now able to entertain many

thousand audiences at the same time, one stage setting is sufficient to

give pleasure to millions. The theater can thus be democratized.

Everybody's purse allows him to see the greatest artists and in every

village a stage can be set up and the joy of a true theater performance

can be spread to the remotest corner of the lands. Just as the

graphophone can multiply without limit the music of the concert hall,

the singer, and the orchestra, so, it seemed, would the photoplay

reproduce the theater performance without end.

Of course, the substitute could not be equal to the original. The color

was lacking, the real depth of the objective stage was missing, and

above all the spoken word had been silenced. The few interspersed

descriptive texts, the so-called "leaders," had to hint at that which

in the real drama the speeches of the actors explain and elaborate. It

was thus surely only the shadow of a true theater, different not only as

a photograph is compared with a painting, but different as a photograph

is compared with the original man. And yet, however meager and

shadowlike the moving picture play appeared compared with the

performance of living actors, the advantage of the cheap multiplication

was so great that the ambition of the producers was natural, to go

forward from the little playlets to great dramas which held the

attention for hours. The kinematographic theater soon had its

Shakespeare repertoire; Ibsen has been played and the dramatized novels

on the screen became legion. Victor Hugo and Dickens scored new

triumphs. In a few years the way from the silly trite practical joke to

Hamlet and Peer Gynt was covered with such thoroughness that the

possibility of giving a photographic rendering of any thinkable theater

performance was proven for all time.

But while this movement to reproduce stage performances went on,

elements were superadded which the technique of the camera allowed but

which would hardly be possible in a theater. Hence the development led

slowly to a certain deviation from the path of the drama. The difference

which strikes the observer first results from the chance of the camera

man to set his scene in the real backgrounds of nature and culture. The

stage manager of the theater can paint the ocean and, if need be, can

move some colored cloth to look like rolling waves; and yet how far is

his effect surpassed by the superb ocean pictures when the scene is

played on the real cliffs and the waves are thundering at their foot and

the surf is foaming about the actors. The theater has its painted

villages and vistas, its city streets and its foreign landscape

backgrounds. But here the theater, in spite of the reality of the

actors, appears thoroughly unreal compared with the throbbing life of

the street scenes and of the foreign crowds in which the camera man

finds his local color.

But still more characteristic is the rapidity with which the whole

background can be changed in the moving pictures. Reinhardt's revolving

stage had brought wonderful surprises to the theater-goer and had

shifted the scene with a quickness which was unknown before. Yet how

slow and clumsy does it remain compared with the routine changes of the

photoplays. This changing of background is so easy for the camera that

at a very early date this new feature of the plays was introduced. At

first it served mostly humorous purposes. The public of the crude early

shows enjoyed the flashlike quickness with which it could follow the

eloper over the roofs of the town, upstairs and down, into cellar and

attic, and jump into the auto and race over the country roads until the

culprit fell over a bridge into the water and was caught by the police.

This slapstick humor has by no means disappeared, but the rapid change

of scenes has meanwhile been put into the service of much higher aims.

The development of an artistic plot has been brought to possibilities

which the real drama does not know, by allowing the eye to follow the

hero and heroine continuously from place to place. Now he leaves his

room, now we see him passing along the street, now he enters the house

of his beloved, now he is led into the parlor, now she is hurrying to

the library of her father, now they all go to the garden: ever new

stage settings sliding into one another. Technical difficulties do not

stand in the way. A set of pictures taken by the camera man a thousand

miles away can be inserted for a few feet in the film, and the audience

sees now the clubroom in New York, and now the snows of Alaska and now

the tropics, near each other in the same reel.

Moreover the ease with which the scenes are altered allows us not only

to hurry on to ever new spots, but to be at the same time in two or

three places. The scenes become intertwined. We see the soldier on the

battlefield, and his beloved one at home, in such steady alternation

that we are simultaneously here and there. We see the man speaking into

the telephone in New York and at the same time the woman who receives

his message in Washington. It is no difficulty at all for the photoplay

to have the two alternate a score of times in the few minutes of the

long distance conversation.

But with the quick change of background the photoartists also gained a

rapidity of motion which leaves actual men behind. He needs only to turn

the crank of the apparatus more quickly and the whole rhythm of the

performance can be brought to a speed which may strikingly aid the

farcical humor of the scene. And from here it was only a step to the

performance of actions which could not be carried out in nature at all.

At first this idea was made serviceable to rather rough comic effects.

The policeman climbed up the solid stone front of a high building. The

camera man had no difficulty in securing the effects, as it was only

necessary to have the actor creep over a flat picture of the building

spread on the floor. Every day brought us new tricks. We see how the

magician breaks one egg after another and takes out of each egg a little

fairy and puts one after another on his hand where they begin to dance a

minuet. No theater could ever try to match such wonders, but for the

camera they are not difficult; the little dancers were simply at a much

further distance from the camera and therefore appeared in their

Lilliputian size. Rich artistic effects have been secured, and while on

the stage every fairy play is clumsy and hardly able to create an

illusion, in the film we really see the man transformed into a beast and

the flower into a girl. There is no limit to the trick pictures which

the skill of the experts invent. The divers jump, feet first, out of

the water to the springboard. It looks magical, and yet the camera man

has simply to reverse his film and to run it from the end to the

beginning of the action. Every dream becomes real, uncanny ghosts appear

from nothing and disappear into nothing, mermaids swim through the waves

and little elves climb out of the Easter lilies.

As the crank of the camera which takes the pictures can be stopped at

any moment and the turning renewed only after some complete change has

been made on the stage any substitution can be carried out without the

public knowing of the break in the events. We see a man walking to the

edge of a steep rock, leaving no doubt that it is a real person, and

then by a slip he is hurled down into the abyss below. The film does not

indicate that at the instant before the fall the camera has been stopped

and the actor replaced by a stuffed dummy which begins to tumble when

the movement of the film is started again. But not only dummies of the

same size can be introduced. A little model brought quite near to the

camera may take the place of the large real object at a far distance. We

see at first the real big ship and can convince ourselves of its

reality by seeing actual men climbing up the rigging. But when it comes

to the final shipwreck, the movement of the film is stopped and the

camera brought near to a little tank where a miniature model of the ship

takes up the rôle of the original and explodes and really sinks to its

two-feet-deep watery grave.

While, through this power to make impossible actions possible, unheard

of effects could be reached, all still remained in the outer framework

of the stage. The photoplay showed a performance, however rapid or

unusual, as it would go on in the outer world. An entirely new

perspective was opened when the managers of the film play introduced the

"close-up" and similar new methods. As every friend of the film knows,

the close-up is a scheme by which a particular part of the picture,

perhaps only the face of the hero or his hand or only a ring on his

finger, is greatly enlarged and replaces for an instant the whole stage.

Even the most wonderful creations, the great historical plays where

thousands fill the battlefields or the most fantastic caprices where

fairies fly over the stage, could perhaps be performed in a theater,

but this close-up leaves all stagecraft behind. Suddenly we see not

Booth himself as he seeks to assassinate the president, but only his

hand holding the revolver and the play of his excited fingers filling

the whole field of vision. We no longer see at his desk the banker who

opens the telegram, but the opened telegraphic message itself takes his

place on the screen for a few seconds, and we read it over his shoulder.

It is not necessary to enumerate still more changes which the

development of the art of the film has brought since the days of the

kinetoscope. The use of natural backgrounds, the rapid change of scenes,

the intertwining of the actions in different scenes, the changes of the

rhythms of action, the passing through physically impossible

experiences, the linking of disconnected movements, the realization of

supernatural effects, the gigantic enlargement of small details: these

may be sufficient as characteristic illustrations of the essential

trend. They show that the progress of the photoplay did not lead to a

more and more perfect photographic reproduction of the theater stage,

but led away from the theater altogether. Superficial impressions

suggest the opposite and still leave the esthetically careless observer

in the belief that the photoplay is a cheap substitute for the real

drama, a theater performance as good or as bad as a photographic

reproduction allows. But this traditional idea has become utterly

untrue. _The art of the photoplay has developed so many new features of

its own, features which have not even any similarity to the technique of

the stage that the question arises: is it not really a new art which

long since left behind the mere film reproduction of the theater and

which ought to be acknowledged in its own esthetic independence?_ This

right to independent recognition has so far been ignored. Practically

everybody who judged the photoplays from the esthetic point of view

remained at the old comparison between the film and the graphophone. The

photoplay is still something which simply imitates the true art of the

drama on the stage. May it not be, on the contrary, that it does not

imitate or replace anything, but is in itself an art as different from

that of the theater as the painter's art is different from that of the

sculptor? And may it not be high time, in the interest of theory and of

practice, to examine the esthetic conditions which would give

independent rights to the new art? If this is really the situation, it

must be a truly fascinating problem, as it would give the chance to

watch the art in its first unfolding. A new esthetic cocoon is broken;

where will the butterfly's wings carry him?

We have at last reached the real problem of this little book. We want to

study the right of the photoplay, hitherto ignored by esthetics, to be

classed as an art in itself under entirely new mental life conditions.

What we need for this study is evidently, first, an insight into the

means by which the moving pictures impress us and appeal to us. Not the

physical means and technical devices are in question, but the mental

means. What psychological factors are involved when we watch the

happenings on the screen? But secondly, we must ask what characterizes

the independence of an art, what constitutes the conditions under which

the works of a special art stand. The first inquiry is psychological,

the second esthetic; the two belong intimately together. Hence we turn

first to the psychological aspect of the moving pictures and later to

the artistic one.

PART I

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE PHOTOPLAY

CHAPTER III[1]

DEPTH AND MOVEMENT

[1] Readers who have no technical interest in physiological

psychology may omit Chapter III and turn directly to Chapter IV on

Attention.

The problem is now quite clear before us. Do the photoplays furnish us

only a photographic reproduction of a stage performance; is their aim

thus simply to be an inexpensive substitute for the real theater, and is

their esthetic standing accordingly far below that of the true dramatic

art, related to it as the photograph of a painting to the original

canvas of the master? Or do the moving pictures bring us an independent

art, controlled by esthetic laws of its own, working with mental appeals

which are fundamentally different from those of the theater, with a

sphere of its own and with ideal aims of its own? If this so far

neglected problem is ours, we evidently need not ask in our further

discussions about all which books on moving pictures have so far put

into the foreground, namely the physical technique of producing the

pictures on the film or of projecting the pictures on the screen, or

anything else which belongs to the technical or physical or economic

aspect of the photoplay industry. Moreover it is then evidently not our

concern to deal with those moving pictures which serve mere curiosity or

the higher desires for information and instruction. Those educational

pictures may give us delight, and certainly much esthetic enjoyment may

be combined with the intellectual satisfaction, when the wonders of

distant lands are unveiled to us. The landscape setting of such a travel

film may be a thing of beauty, but the pictures are not taken for art's

sake. The aim is to serve the spread of knowledge.

Our esthetic interest turns to the means by which the photoplay

influences the mind of the spectator. If we try to understand and to

explain the means by which music exerts its powerful effects, we do not

reach our goal by describing the structure of the piano and of the

violin, or by explaining the physical laws of sound. We must proceed to

the psychology and ask for the mental processes of the hearing of tones

and of chords, of harmonies and disharmonies, of tone qualities and tone

intensities, of rhythms and phrases, and must trace how these elements

are combined in the melodies and compositions. In this way we turn to

the photoplay, at first with a purely psychological interest, and ask

for the elementary excitements of the mind which enter into our

experience of the moving pictures. We now disregard entirely the idea of

the theater performance. We should block our way if we were to start

from the theater and were to ask how much is left out in the mere

photographic substitute. We approach the art of the film theater as if

it stood entirely on its own ground, and extinguish all memory of the

world of actors. We analyze the mental processes which this specific

form of artistic endeavor produces in us.

To begin at the beginning, the photoplay consists of a series of flat

pictures in contrast to the plastic objects of the real world which

surrounds us. But we may stop at once: what does it mean to say that the

surroundings appear to the mind plastic and the moving pictures flat?

The psychology of this difference is easily misunderstood. Of course,

when we are sitting in the picture palace we know that we see a flat

screen and that the object which we see has only two dimensions,

right-left, and up-down, but not the third dimension of depth, of

distance toward us or away from us. It is flat like a picture and never

plastic like a work of sculpture or architecture or like a stage. Yet

this is knowledge and not immediate impression. We have no right

whatever to say that the scenes which we see on the screen appear to us

as flat pictures.

We may become more strongly conscious of this difference between an

object of our knowledge and an object of our impression, if we remember

a well-known instrument, the stereoscope. The stereoscope, which was

quite familiar to the parlor of a former generation, consists of two

prisms through which the two eyes look toward two photographic views of

a landscape. But the two photographic views are not identical. The

landscape is taken from two different points of view, once from the

right and once from the left. As soon as these two views are put into

the stereoscope the right eye sees through the prism only the view from

the right, the left eye only the view from the left. We know very well

that only two flat pictures are before us; yet we cannot help seeing the

landscape in strongly plastic forms. The two different views are

combined in one presentation of the landscape in which the distant

objects appear much further away from us than the foreground. We feel

immediately the depth of things. It is as if we were looking at a small

plastic model of the landscape and in spite of our objective knowledge

cannot recognize the flat pictures in the solid forms which we perceive.

It cannot be otherwise, because whenever in practical life we see an

object, a vase on our table, as a solid body, we get the impression of

its plastic character first of all by seeing it with our two eyes from

two different points of view. The perspective in which our right eye

sees the things on our table is different from the perspective for the

left eye. Our plastic seeing therefore depends upon this combination of

two different perspective views, and whenever we offer to the two eyes

two such one-sided views, they must be combined into the impression of

the substantial thing. The stereoscope thus illustrates clearly that the

knowledge of the flat character of pictures by no means excludes the

actual perception of depth, and the question arises whether the moving

pictures of the photoplay, in spite of our knowledge concerning the

flatness of the screen, do not give us after all the impression of

actual depth.

It may be said offhand that even the complete appearance of depth such

as the stereoscope offers would be in no way contradictory to the idea

of moving pictures. Then the photoplay would give the same plastic

impression which the real stage offers. All that would be needed is

this. When the actors play the scenes, not a single but a double camera

would have to take the pictures. Such a double camera focuses the scene

from two different points of view, corresponding to the position of the

two eyes. Both films are then to be projected on the screen at the same

time by a double projection apparatus which secures complete

correspondence of the two pictures so that in every instance the left

and the right view are overlapping on the screen. This would give, of

course, a chaotic, blurring image. But if the apparatus which projects

the left side view has a green glass in front of the lens and the one

which projects the right side view a red glass, and every person in the

audience has a pair of spectacles with the left glass green and the

right glass red--a cardboard lorgnette with red and green gelatine paper

would do the same service and costs only a few cents--the left eye would

see only the left view, the right eye only the right view. We could not

see the red lines through the green glass nor the green lines through

the red glass. In the moment the left eye gets the left side view only

and the right eye the right side view, the whole chaos of lines on the

screen is organized and we see the pictured room on the screen with the

same depth as if it were really a solid room set on the stage and as if

the rear wall in the room were actually ten or twenty feet behind the

furniture in the front. The effect is so striking that no one can

overcome the feeling of depth under these conditions.

But while the regular motion pictures certainly do not offer us this

complete plastic impression, it would simply be the usual confusion

between knowledge about the picture and its real appearance if we were

to deny that we get a certain impression of depth. If several persons

move in a room, we gain distinctly the feeling that one moves behind

another in the film picture. They move toward us and from us just as

much as they move to the right and left. We actually perceive the chairs

or the rear wall of the room as further away from us than the persons in

the foreground. This is not surprising if we stop to think how we

perceive the depth, for instance, of a real stage. Let us fancy that we

sit in the orchestra of a real theater and see before us the stage set

as a room with furniture and persons in it. We now see the different

objects on the stage at different distances, some near, some far. One of

the causes was just mentioned. We see everything with our right or our

left eye from different points of view. But if now we close one eye and

look at the stage with the right eye only, the plastic effect does not

disappear. The psychological causes for this perception of depth with

one eye are essentially the differences of apparent size, the

perspective relations, the shadows, and the actions performed in the

space. Now all these factors which help us to grasp the furniture on

the stage as solid and substantial play their rôle no less in the room

which is projected on the screen.

We are too readily inclined to imagine that our eye can directly grasp

the different distances in our surroundings. Yet we need only imagine

that a large glass plate is put in the place of the curtain covering the

whole stage. Now we see the stage through the glass; and if we look at

it with one eye only it is evident that every single spot on the stage

must throw its light to our eye by light rays which cross the glass

plate at a particular point. For our seeing it would make no difference

whether the stage is actually behind that glass plate or whether all the

light rays which pass through the plate come from the plate itself. If

those rays with all their different shades of light and dark started

from the surface of the glass plate, the effect on the one eye would

necessarily be the same as if they originated at different distances

behind the glass. This is exactly the case of the screen. If the

pictures are well taken and the projection is sharp and we sit at the

right distance from the picture, we must have the same impression as if

we looked through a glass plate into a real space.

The photoplay is therefore poorly characterized if the flatness of the

pictorial view is presented as an essential feature. That flatness is an

objective part of the technical physical arrangements, but not a feature

of that which we really see in the performance of the photoplay. We are

there in the midst of a three-dimensional world, and the movements of

the persons or of the animals or even of the lifeless things, like the

streaming of the water in the brook or the movements of the leaves in

the wind, strongly maintain our immediate impression of depth. Many

secondary features characteristic of the motion picture may help. For

instance, by a well-known optical illusion the feeling of depth is

strengthened if the foreground is at rest and the background moving.

Thus the ship passing in front of the motionless background of the

harbor by no means suggests depth to the same degree as the picture

taken on the gliding ship itself so that the ship appears to be at rest

and the harbor itself passing by.

The depth effect is so undeniable that some minds are struck by it as

the chief power in the impressions from the screen. Vachel Lindsay, the

poet, feels the plastic character of the persons in the foreground so

fully that he interprets those plays with much individual action as a

kind of sculpture in motion. He says: "The little far off people on the

oldfashioned speaking stage do not appeal to the plastic sense in this

way. They are by comparison mere bits of pasteboard with sweet voices,

while on the other hand the photoplay foreground is full of dumb giants.

The bodies of these giants are in high sculptural relief." Others have

emphasized that this strong feeling of depth touches them most when

persons in the foreground stand with a far distant landscape as

background--much more than when they are seen in a room. Psychologically

this is not surprising either. If the scene were a real room, every

detail in it would appear differently to the two eyes. In the room on

the screen both eyes receive the same impression, and the result is that

the consciousness of depth is inhibited. But when a far distant

landscape is the only background, the impression from the picture and

life is indeed the same. The trees or mountains which are several

hundred feet distant from the eye give to both eyes exactly the same

impression, inasmuch as the small difference of position between the two

eyeballs has no influence compared with the distance of the objects from

our face. We would see the mountains with both eyes alike in reality,

and therefore we feel unhampered in our subjective interpretation of far

distant vision when the screen offers exactly the same picture of the

mountains to our two eyes. Hence in such cases we believe that we see

the persons really in the foreground and the landscape far away.

_Nevertheless we are never deceived; we are fully conscious of the

depth, and yet we do not take it for real depth._ Too much stands in the

way. Some unfavorable conditions are still deficiencies of the

technique; for instance, the camera picture in some respects exaggerates

the distances. If we see through the open door of the rear wall into one

or two other rooms, they appear like a distant corridor. Moreover we

have ideal conditions for vision in the right perspective only when we

sit in front of the screen at a definite distance. We ought to sit

where we see the objects in the picture at the same angle at which the

camera photographed the originals. If we are too near or too far or too

much to one side, we perceive the plastic scene from a viewpoint which

would demand an entirely different perspective than that which the

camera fixated. In motionless pictures this is less disturbing; in

moving pictures every new movement to or from the background must remind

us of the apparent distortion. Moreover, the size and the frame and the

whole setting strongly remind us of the unreality of the perceived

space. But the chief point remains that we see the whole picture with

both eyes and not with only one, and that we are constantly reminded of

the flatness of the picture because the two eyes receive identical

impressions. And we may add an argument nearly related to it, namely,

that the screen as such is an object of our perception and demands an

adaptation of the eye and an independent localization. We are drawn into

this conflict of perception even when we look into a mirror. If we stand

three feet from a large mirror on the wall, we see our reflection three

feet from our eyes in the plate glass and we see it at the same time six

feet from our eye behind the glass. Both localizations take hold of our

mind and produce a peculiar interference. We all have learned to ignore

it, but characteristic illusions remain which indicate the reality of

this doubleness.

In the case of the picture on the screen this conflict is much stronger.

_We certainly see the depth, and yet we cannot accept it._ There is too

much which inhibits belief and interferes with the interpretation of the

people and landscape before us as truly plastic. They are surely not

simply pictures. The persons can move toward us and away from us, and

the river flows into a distant valley. And yet the distance in which the

people move is not the distance of our real space, such as the theater

shows, and the persons themselves are not flesh and blood. It is a

unique inner experience, which is characteristic of the perception of

the photoplays. _We have reality with all its true dimensions; and yet

it keeps the fleeting, passing surface suggestion without true depth and

fullness, as different from a mere picture as from a mere stage

performance._ It brings our mind into a peculiar complex state; and we

shall see that this plays a not unimportant part in the mental make-up

of the whole photoplay.

While the problem of depth in the film picture is easily ignored, the

problem of movement forces itself on every spectator. It seems as if

here the really essential trait of the film performance is to be found,

and that the explanation of the motion in the pictures is the chief task

which the psychologist must meet. We know that any single picture which

the film of the photographer has fixed is immovable. We know,

furthermore, that we do not see the passing by of the long strip of

film. We know that it is rolled from one roll and rolled up on another,

but that this movement from picture to picture is not visible. It goes

on while the field is darkened. What objectively reaches our eye is one

motionless picture after another, but the replacing of one by another

through a forward movement of the film cannot reach our eye at all. Why

do we, nevertheless, see a continuous movement? The problem did not

arise with the kinetoscope only but had interested the preceding

generations who amused themselves with the phenakistoscope and the

stroboscopic disks or the magic cylinder of the zoötrope and bioscope.

The child who made his zoötrope revolve and looked through the slits of

the black cover in the drum saw through every slit the drawing of a dog

in one particular position. Yet as the twenty-four slits passed the eye,

the twenty-four different positions blended into one continuous jumping

movement of the poodle.

But this so-called stroboscopic phenomenon, however interesting it was,

seemed to offer hardly any difficulty. The friends of the zoötrope

surely knew another little plaything, the thaumatrope. Dr. Paris had

invented it in 1827. It shows two pictures, one on the front, one on the

rear side of a card. As soon as the card is quickly revolved about a

central axis, the two pictures fuse into one. If a horse is on one side

and a rider on the other, if a cage is on one and a bird on the other,

we see the rider on the horse and the bird in the cage. It cannot be

otherwise. It is simply the result of the positive afterimages. If at

dark we twirl a glowing joss stick in a circle, we do not see one point

moving from place to place, but we see a continuous circular line. It is

nowhere broken because, if the movement is quick, the positive

afterimage of the light in its first position is still effective in our

eye when the glowing point has passed through the whole circle and has

reached the first position again.

We speak of this effect as a positive afterimage, because it is a real

continuation of the first impression and stands in contrast to the

so-called negative afterimage in which the aftereffect is opposite to

the original stimulus. In the case of a negative afterimage the light

impression leaves a dark spot, the dark impression gives a light

afterimage. Black becomes white and white becomes black; in the world of

colors red leaves a green and green a red afterimage, yellow a blue and

blue a yellow afterimage. If we look at the crimson sinking sun and then

at a white wall, we do not see red light spots but green dark spots.

Compared with these negative pictures, the positive afterimages are

short and they last through any noticeable time only with rather intense

illumination. Yet they are evidently sufficient to bridge the interval

between the two slits in the stroboscopic disk or in the zoötrope, the

interval in which the black paper passes the eye and in which

accordingly no new stimulus reaches the nerves. The routine explanation

of the appearance of movement was accordingly: that every picture of a

particular position left in the eye an afterimage until the next picture

with the slightly changed position of the jumping animal or of the

marching men was in sight, and the afterimage of this again lasted until

the third came. The afterimages were responsible for the fact that no

interruptions were noticeable, while the movement itself resulted simply

from the passing of one position into another. What else is the

perception of movement but the seeing of a long series of different

positions? If instead of looking through the zoötrope we watch a real

trotting horse on a real street, we see its whole body in ever new

progressing positions and its legs in all phases of motion; and this

continuous series is our perception of the movement itself.

This seems very simple. Yet it was slowly discovered that the

explanation is far too simple and that it does not in the least do

justice to the true experiences. With the advance of modern laboratory

psychology the experimental investigations frequently turned to the

analysis of our perception of movement. In the last thirty years many

researches, notably those of Stricker, Exner, Hall, James, Fischer,

Stern, Marbe, Lincke, Wertheimer, and Korte have thrown new light on the

problem by carefully devised experiments. One result of them came

quickly into the foreground of the newer view: the perception of

movement is an independent experience which cannot be reduced to a

simple seeing of a series of different positions. A characteristic

content of consciousness must be added to such a series of visual

impressions. The mere idea of succeeding phases of movement is not at

all the original movement idea. This is suggested first by the various

illusions of movement. We may believe that we perceive a movement where

no actual changes of visual impressions occur. This, to be sure, may

result from a mere misinterpretation of the impression: for instance

when in the railway train at the station we look out of the window and

believe suddenly that our train is moving, while in reality the train on

the neighboring track has started. It is the same when we see the moon

floating quickly through the motionless clouds. We are inclined to

consider as being at rest that which we fixate and to interpret the

relative changes in the field of vision as movements of those parts

which we do not fixate.

But it is different when we come, for instance, to those illusions in

which movement is forced on our perception by contrast and aftereffect.

We look from a bridge into the flowing water and if we turn our eyes

toward the land the motionless shore seems to swim in the opposite

direction. It is not sufficient in such cases to refer to contrasting

eye movements. It can easily be shown by experiments that these

movements and counter-movements in the field of vision can proceed in

opposite directions at the same time and no eye, of course, is able to

move upward and downward, or right and left, in the same moment. A very

characteristic experiment can be performed with a black spiral line on a

white disk. If we revolve such a disk slowly around its center, the

spiral line produces the impression of a continuous enlargement of

concentric curves. The lines start at the center and expand until they

disappear in the periphery. If we look for a minute or two into this

play of the expanding curves and then turn our eyes to the face of a

neighbor, we see at once how the features of the face begin to shrink.

It looks as if the whole face were elastically drawn toward its center.

If we revolve the disk in the opposite direction, the curves seem to

move from the edge of the disk toward the center, becoming smaller and

smaller, and if then we look toward a face, the person seems to swell up

and every point in the face seems to move from the nose toward the chin

or forehead or ears. Our eye which watches such an aftereffect cannot

really move at the same time from the center of the face toward both

ears and the hair and the chin. The impression of movement must

therefore have other conditions than the actual performance of the

movements, and above all it is clear from such tests that the seeing of

the movements is a unique experience which can be entirely independent

from the actual seeing of successive positions. The eye itself gets the

impression of a face at rest, and yet we see the face in the one case

shrinking, in the other case swelling; in the one case every point

apparently moving toward the center, in the other case apparently moving

away from the center. The experience of movement is here evidently

produced by the spectator's mind and not excited from without.

We may approach the same result also from experiments of very different

kind. If a flash of light at one point is followed by a flash at another

point after a very short time, about a twentieth of a second, the two

lights appear to us simultaneous. The first light is still fully visible

when the second flashes, and it cannot be noticed that the second comes

later than the first. If now in the same short time interval the first

light moves toward the second point, we should expect that we would see

the whole process as a lighted line at rest, inasmuch as the beginning

and the end point appear simultaneous, if the end is reached less than a

twentieth of a second after the starting point. But the experiment shows

the opposite result. Instead of the expected lighted line, we see in

this case an actual movement from one point to the other. Again we must

conclude that the movement is more than the mere seeing of successive

positions, as in this case we see the movement, while the isolated

positions do not appear as successive but as simultaneous.

Another group of interesting phenomena of movement may be formed from

those cases in which the moving object is more easily noticed than the

impressions of the whole field through which the movement is carried

out. We may overlook an area in our visual field, especially when it

lies far to one side from our fixation point, but as soon as anything

moves in that area our attention is drawn. We notice the movement more

quickly than the whole background in which the movement is executed. The

fluttering of kerchiefs at a far distance or the waving of flags for

signaling is characteristic. All indicate that the movement is to us

something different from merely seeing an object first at one and

afterward at another place. We can easily find the analogy in other

senses. If we touch our forehead or the back of our hand with two blunt

compass points so that the two points are about a third of an inch

distant from each other, we do not discriminate the two points as two,

but we perceive the impression as that of one point. We cannot

discriminate the one pressure point from the other. But if we move the

point of a pencil to and fro from one point to the other we perceive

distinctly the movement in spite of the fact that it is a movement

between two end points which could not be discriminated. It is wholly

characteristic that the experimenter in every field of sensations,

visual or acoustical or tactual, often finds himself before the

experience of having noticed a movement while he is unable to say in

which direction the movement occurred.

We are familiar with the illusions in which we believe that we see

something which only our imagination supplies. If an unfamiliar printed

word is exposed to our eye for the twentieth part of a second, we

readily substitute a familiar word with similar letters. Everybody knows

how difficult it is to read proofs. We overlook the misprints, that is,

we replace the wrong letters which are actually in our field of vision

by imaginary right letters which correspond to our expectations. Are we

not also familiar with the experience of supplying by our fancy the

associative image of a movement when only the starting point and the end

point are given, if a skillful suggestion influences our mind. The

prestidigitator stands on one side of the stage when he apparently

throws the costly watch against the mirror on the other side of the

stage; the audience sees his suggestive hand movement and the

disappearance of the watch and sees twenty feet away the shattering of

the mirror. The suggestible spectator cannot help seeing the flight of

the watch across the stage.

The recent experiments by Wertheimer and Korte have gone into still

subtler details. Both experimenters worked with a delicate instrument in

which two light lines on a dark ground could be exposed in very quick

succession and in which it was possible to vary the position of the

lines, the distance of the lines, the intensity of their light, the time

exposure of each, and the time between the appearance of the first and

of the second. They studied all these factors, and moreover the

influence of differently directed attention and suggestive attitude. If

a vertical line is immediately followed by a horizontal, the two

together may give the impression of one right angle. If the time between

the vertical and the horizontal line is long, first one and then the

other is seen. But at a certain length of the time interval, a new

effect is reached. We see the vertical line falling over and lying flat

like the horizontal line. If the eyes are fixed on the point in the

midst of the angle, we might expect that this movement phenomenon would

stop, but the opposite is the case. The apparent movement from the

vertical to the horizontal has to pass our fixation point and it seems

that we ought now to recognize clearly that there is nothing between

those two positions, that the intermediate phases of the movement are

lacking; and yet the experiment shows that under these circumstances we

frequently get the strongest impression of motion. If we use two

horizontal lines, the one above the other, we see, if the right time

interval is chosen, that the upper one moves downward toward the lower.

But we can introduce there a very interesting variation. If we make the

lower line, which appears objectively after the upper one, more intense,

the total impression is one which begins with the lower. We see first

the lower line moving toward the upper one which also approaches the

lower; and then follows the second phase in which both appear to fall

down to the position of the lower one. It is not necessary to go further

into details in order to demonstrate that the apparent movement is in no

way the mere result of an afterimage and that the impression of motion

is surely more than the mere perception of successive phases of

movement. The movement is in these cases not really seen from without,

but is superadded, by the action of the mind, to motionless pictures.

The statement that our impression of movement does not result simply

from the seeing of successive stages but includes a higher mental act

into which the successive visual impressions enter merely as factors is

in itself not really an explanation. We have not settled by it the

nature of that higher central process. But it is enough for us to see

that the impression of the continuity of the motion results from a

complex mental process by which the various pictures are held together

in the unity of a higher act. Nothing can characterize the situation

more clearly than the fact which has been demonstrated by many

experiments, namely, that this feeling of movement is in no way

interfered with by the distinct consciousness that important phases of

the movement are lacking. On the contrary, under certain circumstances

we become still more fully aware of this apparent motion created by our

inner activity when we are conscious of the interruptions between the

various phases of movement.

We come to the consequences. What is then the difference between seeing

motion in the photoplay and seeing it on the real stage? There on the

stage where the actors move the eye really receives a continuous series.

Each position goes over into the next without any interruption. The

spectator receives everything from without and the whole movement which

he sees is actually going on in the world of space without and

accordingly in his eye. But if he faces the film world, _the motion

which he sees appears to be a true motion, and yet is created by his own

mind_. The afterimages of the successive pictures are not sufficient to

produce a substitute for the continuous outer stimulation; the essential

condition is rather the inner mental activity which unites the separate

phases in the idea of connected action. Thus we have reached the exact

counterpart of our results when we analyzed the perception of depth. We

see actual depth in the pictures, and yet we are every instant aware

that it is not real depth and that the persons are not really plastic.

It is only a suggestion of depth, a depth created by our own activity,

but not actually seen, because essential conditions for the true

perception of depth are lacking. Now we find that the movement too is

perceived but that the eye does not receive the impressions of true

movement. It is only a suggestion of movement, and the idea of motion is

to a high degree the product of our own reaction. _Depth and movement

alike come to us in the moving picture world, not as hard facts but as a

mixture of fact and symbol. They are present and yet they are not in the

things. We invest the impressions with them._ The theater has both depth

and motion, without any subjective help; the screen has them and yet

lacks them. We see things distant and moving, but we furnish to them

more than we receive; we create the depth and the continuity through our

mental mechanism.

CHAPTER IV

ATTENTION

The mere perception of the men and women and of the background, with all

their depth and their motion, furnishes only the material. The scene

which keeps our interest alive certainly involves much more than the

simple impression of moving and distant objects. We must accompany those

sights with a wealth of ideas. They must have a meaning for us, they

must be enriched by our own imagination, they must awaken the remnants

of earlier experiences, they must stir up our feelings and emotions,

they must play on our suggestibility, they must start ideas and

thoughts, they must be linked in our mind with the continuous chain of

the play, and they must draw our attention constantly to the important

and essential element of the action. An abundance of such inner

processes must meet the world of impressions and the psychological

analysis has only started when perception of depth and movement alone

are considered. If we hear Chinese, we perceive the sounds, but there is

no inner response to the words; they are meaningless and dead for us; we

have no interest in them. If we hear the same thoughts expressed in our

mother tongue, every syllable carries its meaning and message. Then we

are readily inclined to fancy that this additional significance which

belongs to the familiar language and which is absent from the foreign

one is something which comes to us in the perception itself as if the

meaning too were passing through the channels of our ears. But

psychologically the meaning is ours. In learning the language we have

learned to add associations and reactions of our own to the sounds which

we perceive. It is not different with the optical perceptions. The best

does not come from without.

Of all internal functions which create the meaning of the world around

us, the most central is the attention. The chaos of the surrounding

impressions is organized into a real cosmos of experience by our

selection of that which is significant and of consequence. This is true

for life and stage alike. Our attention must be drawn now here, now

there, if we want to bind together that which is scattered in the space

before us. Everything must be shaded by attention and inattention.

Whatever is focused by our attention wins emphasis and irradiates

meaning over the course of events. In practical life we discriminate

between voluntary and involuntary attention. We call it voluntary if we

approach the impressions with an idea in our mind as to what we want to

focus our attention on. We carry our personal interest, our own idea

into the observation of the objects. Our attention has chosen its aim

beforehand, and we ignore all that does not fulfil this specific

interest. All our working is controlled by such voluntary attention. We

have the idea of the goal which we want to reach in our mind beforehand

and subordinate all which we meet to this selective energy. Through our

voluntary attention we seek something and accept the offering of the

surroundings only in so far as it brings us what we are seeking.

It is quite different with the involuntary attention. The guiding

influence here comes from without. The cue for the focusing of our

attention lies in the events which we perceive. What is loud and shining

and unusual attracts our involuntary attention. We must turn our mind to

a place where an explosion occurs, we must read the glaring electric

signs which flash up. To be sure, the perceptions which force themselves

on our involuntary attention may get their motive power from our own

reactions. Everything which appeals to our natural instincts, everything

which stirs up hope or fear, enthusiasm or indignation, or any strong

emotional excitement will get control of our attention. But in spite of

this circuit through our emotional responses the starting point lies

without and our attention is accordingly of the involuntary type. In our

daily activity voluntary and involuntary attention are always

intertwined. Our life is a great compromise between that which our

voluntary attention aims at and that which the aims of the surrounding

world force on our involuntary attention.

How does the theater performance differ in this respect from life? Might

we not say that voluntary attention is eliminated from the sphere of

art and that the audience is necessarily following the lead of an

attention which receives all its cues from the work of art itself and

which therefore acts involuntarily? To be sure, we may approach a

theater performance with a voluntary purpose of our own. For instance,

we may be interested in a particular actor and may watch him with our

opera glass all the time whenever he is on the stage, even in scenes in

which his rôle is insignificant and in which the artistic interest ought

to belong to the other actors. But such voluntary selection has

evidently nothing to do with the theater performance as such. By such

behavior we break the spell in which the artistic drama ought to hold

us. We disregard the real shadings of the play and by mere personal side

interests put emphasis where it does not belong. If we really enter into

the spirit of the play, our attention is constantly drawn in accordance

with the intentions of the producers.

Surely the theater has no lack of means to draw this involuntary

attention to any important point. To begin with, the actor who speaks

holds our attention more strongly than the actors who at that time are

silent. Yet the contents of the words may direct our interest to anybody

else on the stage. We watch him whom the words accuse, or betray or

delight. But the mere interest springing from words cannot in the least

explain that constantly shifting action of our involuntary attention

during a theater performance. The movements of the actors are essential.

The pantomime without words can take the place of the drama and still

appeal to us with overwhelming power. The actor who comes to the

foreground of the stage is at once in the foreground of our

consciousness. He who lifts his arm while the others stand quiet has

gained our attention. Above all, every gesture, every play of the

features, brings order and rhythm into the manifoldness of the

impressions and organizes them for our mind. Again, the quick action,

the unusual action, the repeated action, the unexpected action, the

action with strong outer effect, will force itself on our mind and

unbalance the mental equilibrium.

The question arises: how does the photoplay secure the needed shifting

of attention? Here, too, involuntary attention alone can be expected.

An attention which undertakes its explorations guided by preconceived

ideas instead of yielding to the demands of the play would lack

adjustment to its task. We might sit through the photoplay with the

voluntary intention of watching the pictures with a scientific interest

in order to detect some mechanical traits of the camera, or with a

practical interest, in order to look up some new fashions, or with a

professional interest, in order to find out in what New England scenery

these pictures of Palestine might have been photographed. But none of

these aspects has anything to do with the photoplay. If we follow the

play in a genuine attitude of theatrical interest, we must accept those

cues for our attention which the playwright and the producers have

prepared for us. But there is surely no lack of means by which our mind

can be influenced and directed in the rapid play of the pictures.

Of course the spoken word is lacking. We know how often the words on the

screen serve as substitutes for the speech of the actors. They appear

sometimes as so-called "leaders" between the pictures, sometimes even

thrown into the picture itself, sometimes as content of a written

letter or of a telegram or of a newspaper clipping which is projected

like a picture, strongly enlarged, on the screen. In all these cases the

words themselves prescribe the line in which the attention must move and

force the interest of the spectator toward the new goal. But such help

by the writing on the wall is, after all, extraneous to the original

character of the photoplay. As long as we study the psychological effect

of the moving pictures themselves, we must concentrate our inquiry on

the moving pictures as such and not on that which the playwright does

for the interpretation of the pictures. It may be granted that the

letters and newspaper articles take a middle place. They are a part of

the picture, but their influence on the spectator is, nevertheless, very

similar to that of the leaders. We are here concerned only with what the

pictorial offering contains. We must therefore also disregard the

accompanying music or the imitative noises which belong to the technique

of the full-fledged photoplay nowadays. They do not a little to push the

attention hither and thither. Yet they are accessory, while the primary

power must lie in the content of the pictures themselves.

But it is evident that with the exception of the words, no means for

drawing attention which is effective on the theater stage is lost in the

photoplay. All the directing influences which the movements of the

actors exert can be felt no less when they are pictured in the films.

More than that, the absence of the words brings the movements which we

see to still greater prominence in our mind. Our whole attention can now

be focused on the play of the face and of the hands. Every gesture and

every mimic excitement stirs us now much more than if it were only the

accompaniment of speech. Moreover, the technical conditions of the

kinematograph show favor the importance of the movement. First the play

on the screen is acted more rapidly than that on the stage. By the

absence of speech everything is condensed, the whole rhythm is

quickened, a greater pressure of time is applied, and through that the

accents become sharper and the emphasis more powerful for the attention.

But secondly the form of the stage intensifies the impression made by

those who move toward the foreground. The theater stage is broadest near

the footlights and becomes narrower toward the background; the moving

picture stage is narrowest in front and becomes wider toward the

background. This is necessary because its width is controlled by the

angle at which the camera takes the picture. The camera is the apex of

an angle which encloses a breadth of only a few feet in the nearest

photographic distance, while it may include a width of miles in the far

distant landscape. Whatever comes to the foreground therefore gains

strongly in relative importance over its surroundings. Moving away from

the camera means a reduction much greater than a mere stepping to the

background on the theater stage. Furthermore lifeless things have much

more chance for movements in the moving pictures than on the stage and

their motions, too, can contribute toward the right setting of the

attention.

But we know from the theater that movement is not the only condition

which makes us focus our interest on a particular element of the play.

An unusual face, a queer dress, a gorgeous costume or a surprising lack

of costume, a quaint piece of decoration, may attract our mind and even

hold it spellbound for a while. Such means can not only be used but can

be carried to a much stronger climax of efficiency by the unlimited

means of the moving pictures. This is still more true of the power of

setting or background. The painted landscape of the stage can hardly

compete with the wonders of nature and culture when the scene of the

photoplay is laid in the supreme landscapes of the world. Wide vistas

are opened, the woods and the streams, the mountain valleys and the

ocean, are before us with the whole strength of reality; and yet in

rapid change which does not allow the attention to become fatigued.

Finally the mere formal arrangement of the succeeding pictures may keep

our attention in control, and here again are possibilities which are

superior to those of the solid theater stage. At the theater no effect

of formal arrangement can give exactly the same impression to the

spectators in every part of the house. The perspective of the wings and

the other settings and their relation to the persons and to the

background can never appear alike from the front and from the rear, from

the left and from the right side, from the orchestra and from the

balcony, while the picture which the camera has fixated is the same

from every corner of the picture palace. The greatest skill and

refinement can be applied to make the composition serviceable to the

needs of attention. The spectator may not and ought not to be aware that

the lines of the background, the hangings of the room, the curves of the

furniture, the branches of the trees, the forms of the mountains, help

to point toward the figure of the woman who is to hold his mind. The

shading of the lights, the patches of dark shadows, the vagueness of

some parts, the sharp outlines of others, the quietness of some parts of

the picture as against the vehement movement of others all play on the

keyboard of our mind and secure the desired effect on our involuntary

attention.

But if all is admitted, we still have not touched on the most important

and most characteristic relation of the photoplay pictures to the

attention of the audience; and here we reach a sphere in which any

comparison with the stage of the theater would be in vain. What is

attention? What are the essential processes in the mind when we turn our

attention to one face in the crowd, to one little flower in the wide

landscape? It would be wrong to describe the process in the mind by

reference to one change alone. If we have to give an account of the act

of attention, as seen by the modern psychologist, we ought to point to

several coördinated features. They are not independent of one another

but are closely interrelated. We may say that whatever attracts our

attention in the sphere of any sense, sight or sound, touch or smell,

surely becomes more vivid and more clear in our consciousness. This does

not at all mean that it becomes more intense. A faint light to which we

turn our attention does not become the strong light of an incandescent

lamp. No, it remains the faint, just perceptible streak of lightness,

but it has grown more impressive, more distinct, more clear in its

details, more vivid. It has taken a stronger hold of us or, as we may

say by a metaphor, it has come into the center of our consciousness.

But this involves a second aspect which is surely no less important.

While the attended impression becomes more vivid, all the other

impressions become less vivid, less clear, less distinct, less detailed.

They fade away. We no longer notice them. They have no hold on our

mind, they disappear. If we are fully absorbed in our book, we do not

hear at all what is said around us and we do not see the room; we forget

everything. Our attention to the page of the book brings with it our

lack of attention to everything else. We may add a third factor. We feel

that our body adjusts itself to the perception. Our head enters into the

movement of listening for the sound, our eyes are fixating the point in

the outer world. We hold all our muscles in tension in order to receive

the fullest possible impression with our sense organs. The lens in our

eye is accommodated exactly to the correct distance. In short our bodily

personality works toward the fullest possible impression. But this is

supplemented by a fourth factor. Our ideas and feelings and impulses

group themselves around the attended object. It becomes the starting

point for our actions while all the other objects in the sphere of our

senses lose their grip on our ideas and feelings. These four factors are

intimately related to one another. As we are passing along the street we

see something in the shop window and as soon as it stirs up our

interest, our body adjusts itself, we stop, we fixate it, we get more

of the detail in it, the lines become sharper, and while it impresses us

more vividly than before the street around us has lost its vividness and

clearness.

If on the stage the hand movements of the actor catch our interest, we

no longer look at the whole large scene, we see only the fingers of the

hero clutching the revolver with which he is to commit his crime. Our

attention is entirely given up to the passionate play of his hand. It

becomes the central point for all our emotional responses. We do not see

the hands of any other actor in the scene. Everything else sinks into a

general vague background, while that one hand shows more and more

details. The more we fixate it, the more its clearness and distinctness

increase. From this one point wells our emotion, and our emotion again

concentrates our senses on this one point. It is as if this one hand

were during this pulse beat of events the whole scene, and everything

else had faded away. On the stage this is impossible; there nothing can

really fade away. That dramatic hand must remain, after all, only the

ten thousandth part of the space of the whole stage; it must remain a

little detail. The whole body of the hero and the other men and the

whole room and every indifferent chair and table in it must go on

obtruding themselves on our senses. What we do not attend cannot be

suddenly removed from the stage. Every change which is needed must be

secured by our own mind. In our consciousness the attended hand must

grow and the surrounding room must blur. But the stage cannot help us.

The art of the theater has there its limits.

Here begins the art of the photoplay. That one nervous hand which

feverishly grasps the deadly weapon can suddenly for the space of a

breath or two become enlarged and be alone visible on the screen, while

everything else has really faded into darkness. The act of attention

which goes on in our mind has remodeled the surrounding itself. The

detail which is being watched has suddenly become the whole content of

the performance, and everything which our mind wants to disregard has

been suddenly banished from our sight and has disappeared. The events

without have become obedient to the demands of our consciousness. In the

language of the photoplay producers it is a "close-up." _The close-up

has objectified in our world of perception our mental act of attention

and by it has furnished art with a means which far transcends the power

of any theater stage._

The scheme of the close-up was introduced into the technique of the film

play rather late, but it has quickly gained a secure position. The more

elaborate the production, the more frequent and the more skillful the

use of this new and artistic means. The melodrama can hardly be played

without it, unless a most inartistic use of printed words is made. The

close-up has to furnish the explanations. If a little locket is hung on

the neck of the stolen or exchanged infant, it is not necessary to tell

us in words that everything will hinge on this locket twenty years later

when the girl is grown up. If the ornament at the child's throat is at

once shown in a close-up where everything has disappeared and only its

quaint form appears much enlarged on the screen, we fix it in our

imagination and know that we must give our fullest attention to it, as

it will play a decisive part in the next reel. The gentleman criminal

who draws his handkerchief from his pocket and with it a little bit of

paper which falls down on the rug unnoticed by him has no power to draw

our attention to that incriminating scrap. The device hardly belongs in

the theater because the audience would not notice it any more than would

the scoundrel himself. It would not be able to draw the attention. But

in the film it is a favorite trick. At the moment the bit of paper

falls, we see it greatly enlarged on the rug, while everything else has

faded away, and we read on it that it is a ticket from the railway

station at which the great crime was committed. Our attention is focused

on it and we know that it will be decisive for the development of the

action.

A clerk buys a newspaper on the street, glances at it and is shocked.

Suddenly we see that piece of news with our own eyes. The close-up

magnifies the headlines of the paper so that they fill the whole screen.

But it is not necessary that this focusing of the attention should refer

to levers in the plot. Any subtle detail, any significant gesture which

heightens the meaning of the action may enter into the center of our

consciousness by monopolizing the stage for a few seconds. There is love

in her smiling face, and yet we overlook it as they stand in a crowded

room. But suddenly, only for three seconds, all the others in the room

have disappeared, the bodies of the lovers themselves have faded away,

and only his look of longing and her smile of yielding reach out to us.

The close-up has done what no theater could have offered by its own

means, though we might have approached the effect in the theater

performance if we had taken our opera glass and had directed it only to

those two heads. But by doing so we should have emancipated ourselves

from the offering of the stage picture, that is, the concentration and

focusing were secured by us and not by the performance. In the photoplay

it is the opposite.

Have we not reached by this analysis of the close-up a point very near

to that to which the study of depth perception and movement perception

was leading? We saw that the moving pictures give us the plastic world

and the moving world, and that nevertheless the depth and the motion in

it are not real, unlike the depth and motion of the stage. We find now

that the reality of the action in the photoplay in still another respect

lacks objective independence, because it yields to our subjective play

of attention. Wherever our attention becomes focused on a special

feature, the surrounding adjusts itself, eliminates everything in which

we are not interested, and by the close-up heightens the vividness of

that on which our mind is concentrated. It is as if that outer world

were woven into our mind and were shaped not through its own laws but by

the acts of our attention.

CHAPTER V

MEMORY AND IMAGINATION

When we sit in a real theater and see the stage with its depth and watch

the actors moving and turn our attention hither and thither, we feel

that those impressions from behind the footlights have objective

character, while the action of our attention is subjective. Those men

and things come from without but the play of the attention starts from

within. Yet our attention, as we have seen, does not really add anything

to the impressions of the stage. It makes some more vivid and clear

while others become vague or fade away, but through the attention alone

no content enters our consciousness. Wherever our attention may wander

on the stage, whatever we experience comes to us through the channels of

our senses. The spectator in the audience, however, does experience more

than merely the light and sound sensations which fall on the eye and

ear at that moment. He may be entirely fascinated by the actions on the

stage and yet his mind may be overflooded with other ideas. Only one of

their sources, but not the least important one, is the memory.

Indeed the action of the memory brings to the mind of the audience ever

so much which gives fuller meaning and ampler setting to every

scene--yes, to every word and movement on the stage. To think of the

most trivial case, at every point of the drama we must remember what

happened in the previous scenes. The first act is no longer on the stage

when we see the second. The second alone is now our sense impression.

Yet this second act is in itself meaningless if it is not supported by

the first. Hence the first must somehow be in our consciousness. At

least in every important scene we must remember those situations of the

preceding act which can throw light on the new developments. We see the

young missionary in his adventures on his perilous journey and we

remember how in the preceding act we saw him in his peaceful cottage

surrounded by the love of his parents and sisters and how they mourned

when he left them behind. The more exciting the dangers he passes

through in the far distant land, the more strongly does our memory carry

us back to the home scenes which we witnessed before. The theater cannot

do more than suggest to our memory this looking backward. The young hero

may call this reminiscence back to our consciousness by his speech and

his prayer, and when he fights his way through the jungles of Africa and

the savages attack him, the melodrama may put words into his mouth which

force us to think fervently of those whom he has left behind. But, after

all, it is our own material of memory ideas which supplies the picture.

The theater cannot go further. The photoplay can. We see the jungle, we

see the hero at the height of his danger; and suddenly there flashes

upon the screen a picture of the past. For not more than two seconds

does the idyllic New England scene slip into the exciting African

events. When one deep breath is over we are stirred again by the event

of the present. That home scene of the past flitted by just as a hasty

thought of bygone days darts through the mind.

The modern photoartist makes use of this technical device in an

abundance of forms. In his slang any going back to an earlier scene is

called a "cut-back." The cut-back may have many variations and serve

many purposes. But the one which we face here is psychologically the

most interesting. We have really an objectivation of our memory

function. The case of the cut-back is there quite parallel to that of

the close-up. In the one we recognize the mental act of attending, in

the other we must recognize the mental act of remembering. _In both

cases the act which in the ordinary theater would go on in our mind

alone is here in the photoplay projected into the pictures themselves.

It is as if reality has lost its own continuous connection and become

shaped by the demands of our soul._ It is as if the outer world itself

became molded in accordance with our fleeting turns of attention or with

our passing memory ideas.

It is only another version of the same principle when the course of

events is interrupted by forward glances. The mental function involved

is that of expectation or, when the expectation is controlled by our

feelings, we may class it under the mental function of imagination. The

melodrama shows us how the young millionaire wastes his nights in a

dissipated life, and when he drinks his blasphemous toast at a champagne

feast with shameless women, we suddenly see on the screen the vision of

twenty years later when the bartender of a most miserable saloon pushes

the penniless tramp out into the gutter. The last act in the theater may

bring us to such an ending, but there it can come only in the regular

succession of events. That pitiful ending cannot be shown to us when

life is still blooming and when a twenty years' downward course is still

to be interpreted. There only our own imagination can anticipate how the

mill of life may grind. In the photoplay our imagination is projected on

the screen. With an uncanny contrast that ultimate picture of defeat

breaks in where victory seems most glorious; and five seconds later the

story of youth and rapture streams on. Again we see the course of the

natural events remolded by the power of the mind. The theater can

picture only how the real occurrences might follow one another; the

photoplay can overcome the interval of the future as well as the

interval of the past and slip the day twenty years hence between this

minute and the next. In short, it can act as our imagination acts. It

has the mobility of our ideas which are not controlled by the physical

necessity of outer events but by the psychological laws for the

association of ideas. In our mind past and future become intertwined

with the present. The photoplay obeys the laws of the mind rather than

those of the outer world.

But the play of memory and imagination can have a still richer

significance in the art of the film. The screen may produce not only

what we remember or imagine but what the persons in the play see in

their own minds. The technique of the camera stage has successfully

introduced a distinct form for this kind of picturing. If a person in

the scene remembers the past, a past which may be entirely unknown to

the spectator but which is living in the memory of the hero or heroine,

then the former events are not thrown on the screen as an entirely new

set of pictures, but they are connected with the present scene by a slow

transition. He sits at the fireplace in his study and receives the

letter with the news of her wedding. The close-up picture which shows

us the enlargement of the engraved wedding announcement appears as an

entirely new picture. The room suddenly disappears and the hand which

holds the card flashes up. Again when we have read the card, it suddenly

disappears and we are in the room again. But when he has dreamily

stirred the fire and sits down and gazes into the flames, then the room

seems to dissolve, the lines blur, the details fade away, and while the

walls and the whole room slowly melt, with the same slow transition the

flower garden blossoms out, the flower garden where he and she sat

together under the lilac bush and he confessed to her his boyish love.

And then the garden slowly vanishes and through the flowers we see once

more the dim outlines of the room and they become sharper and sharper

until we are in the midst of the study again and nothing is left of the

vision of the past.

The technique of manufacturing such gradual transitions from one picture

into another and back again demands much patience and is more difficult

than the sudden change, as two exactly corresponding sets of views have

to be produced and finally combined. But this cumbersome method has been

fully accepted in moving picture making and the effect indeed somewhat

symbolizes the appearance and disappearance of a reminiscence.

This scheme naturally opens wide perspectives. The skilful

photoplaywright can communicate to us long scenes and complicated

developments of the past in the form of such retrospective pictures. The

man who shot his best friend has not offered an explanation in the court

trial which we witness. It remains a perfect secret to the town and a

mystery to the spectator; and now as the jail door closes behind him the

walls of the prison fuse and melt away and we witness the scene in the

little cottage where his friend secretly met his wife and how he broke

in and how it all came about and how he rejected every excuse which

would dishonor his home. The whole murder story becomes embedded in the

reappearance of his memory ideas. The effect is much less artistic when

the photoplay, as not seldom happens, uses this pattern as a mere

substitute for words. In the picturization of a Gaboriau story the woman

declines to tell before the court her life story which ended in a

crime. She finally yields, she begins under oath to describe her whole

past; and at the moment when she opens her mouth the courtroom

disappears and fades into the scene in which the love adventure began.

Then we pass through a long set of scenes which lead to the critical

point, and at that moment we slide back into the courtroom and the woman

finishes her confession. That is an external substitution of the

pictures for the words, esthetically on a much lower level than the

other case where the past was living only in the memory of the witness.

Yet it is again an embodiment of past events which the genuine theater

could offer to the ear but never to the eye.

Just as we can follow the reminiscences of the hero, we may share the

fancies of his imagination. Once more the case is distinctly different

from the one in which we, the spectators, had our imaginative ideas

realized on the screen. Here we are passive witnesses to the wonders

which are unveiled through the imagination of the persons in the play.

We see the boy who is to enter the navy and who sleeps on shipboard the

first night; the walls disappear and his imagination flutters from port

to port. All he has seen in the pictures of foreign lands and has heard

from his comrades becomes the background of his jubilant adventures. Now

he stands in the rigging while the proud vessel sails into the harbor of

Rio de Janeiro and now into Manila Bay; now he enjoys himself in

Japanese ports and now by the shores of India; now he glides through the

Suez Canal and now he returns to the skyscrapers of New York. Not more

than one minute was needed for his world travel in beautiful fantastic

pictures; and yet we lived through all the boy's hopes and ecstasies

with him. If we had seen the young sailor in his hammock on the theater

stage, he might have hinted to us whatever passed through his mind by a

kind of monologue or by some enthusiastic speech to a friend. But then

we should have seen before our inner eye only that which the names of

foreign places awake in ourselves. We should not really have seen the

wonders of the world through the eyes of his soul and with the glow of

his hope. The drama would have given dead names to our ear; the

photoplay gives ravishing scenery to our eye and shows the fancy of the

young fellow in the scene really living.

From here we see the perspective to the fantastic dreams which the

camera can fixate. Whenever the theater introduces an imagined setting

and the stage clouds sink over the sleeper and the angels fill the

stage, the beauty of the verses must excuse the shortcomings of the

visual appeal. The photoplay artist can gain his triumphs here. Even the

vulgar effects become softened by this setting. The ragged tramp who

climbs a tree and falls asleep in the shady branches and then lives

through a reversed world in which he and his kind feast and glory and

live in palaces and sail in yachts, and, when the boiler of the yacht

explodes, falls from the tree to the ground, becomes a tolerable

spectacle because all is merged in the unreal pictures. Or, to think of

the other extreme, gigantic visions of mankind crushed by the Juggernaut

of war and then blessed by the angel of peace may arise before our eyes

with all their spiritual meaning.

Even the whole play may find its frame in a setting which offers a

five-reel performance as one great imaginative dream. In the pretty

play, "When Broadway was a Trail," the hero and heroine stand on the

Metropolitan Tower and bend over its railing. They see the turmoil of

New York of the present day and ships passing the Statue of Liberty. He

begins to tell her of the past when in the seventeenth century Broadway

was a trail; and suddenly the time which his imagination awakens is with

us. Through two hours we follow the happenings of three hundred years

ago. From New Amsterdam it leads to the New England shores, all the

early colonial life shows us its intimate charm, and when the hero has

found his way back over the Broadway trail, we awake and see the last

gestures with which the young narrator shows to the girl the Broadway

buildings of today.

Memory looks toward the past, expectation and imagination toward the

future. But in the midst of the perception of our surroundings our mind

turns not only to that which has happened before and which may happen

later; it is interested in happenings at the same time in other places.

The theater can show us only the events at one spot. Our mind craves

more. Life does not move forward on one single pathway. The whole

manifoldness of parallel currents with their endless interconnections

is the true substance of our understanding. It may be the task of a

particular art to force all into one steady development between the

walls of one room, but every letter and every telephone call to the room

remind us even then that other developments with other settings are

proceeding in the same instant. The soul longs for this whole interplay,

and the richer it is in contrasts, the more satisfaction may be drawn

from our simultaneous presence in many quarters. The photoplay alone

gives us our chance for such omnipresence. We see the banker, who had

told his young wife that he has a directors' meeting, at a late hour in

a cabaret feasting with a stenographer from his office. She had promised

her poor old parents to be home early. We see the gorgeous roof garden

and the tango dances, but our dramatic interest is divided among the

frivolous pair, the jealous young woman in the suburban cottage, and the

anxious old people in the attic. Our mind wavers among the three scenes.

The photoplay shows one after another. Yet it can hardly be said that we

think of them as successive. It is as if we were really at all three

places at once. We see the joyous dance which is of central dramatic

interest for twenty seconds, then for three seconds the wife in her

luxurious boudoir looking at the dial of the clock, for three seconds

again the grieved parents eagerly listening for any sound on the stairs,

and anew for twenty seconds the turbulent festival. The frenzy reaches a

climax, and in that moment we are suddenly again with his unhappy wife;

it is only a flash, and the next instant we see the tears of the girl's

poor mother. The three scenes proceed almost as if no one were

interrupted at all. It is as if we saw one through another, as if three

tones blended into one chord.

There is no limit to the number of threads which may be interwoven. A

complex intrigue may demand coöperation at half a dozen spots, and we

look now into one, now into another, and never have the impression that

they come one after another. The temporal element has disappeared, the

one action irradiates in all directions. Of course, this can easily be

exaggerated, and the result must be a certain restlessness. If the scene

changes too often and no movement is carried on without a break, the

play may irritate us by its nervous jerking from place to place. Near

the end of the Theda Bara edition of Carmen the scene changes one

hundred and seventy times in ten minutes, an average of a little more

than three seconds for each scene. We follow Don Jose and Carmen and the

toreador in ever new phases of the dramatic action and are constantly

carried back to Don Jose's home village where his mother waits for him.

There indeed the dramatic tension has an element of nervousness, in

contrast to the Geraldine Farrar version of Carmen which allows a more

unbroken development of the single action.

But whether it is used with artistic reserve or with a certain dangerous

exaggeration, in any case its psychological meaning is obvious. It

demonstrates to us in a new form the same principle which the perception

of depth and of movement, the acts of attention and of memory and of

imagination have shown. _The objective world is molded by the interests

of the mind. Events which are far distant from one another so that we

could not be physically present at all of them at the same time are

fusing in our field of vision, just as they are brought together in our

own consciousness._ Psychologists are still debating whether the mind

can ever devote itself to several groups of ideas at the same time. Some

claim that any so-called division of attention is really a rapid

alteration. Yet in any case subjectively we experience it as an actual

division. Our mind is split and can be here and there apparently in one

mental act. This inner division, this awareness of contrasting

situations, this interchange of diverging experiences in the soul, can

never be embodied except in the photoplay.

An interesting side light falls on this relation between the mind and

the pictured scenes, if we turn to a mental process which is quite

nearly related to those which we have considered, namely, suggestion. It

is similar in that a suggested idea which awakes in our consciousness is

built up from the same material as the memory ideas or the imaginative

ideas. The play of associations controls the suggestions, as it does the

reminiscences and fancies. Yet in an essential point it is quite

different. All the other associative ideas find merely their starting

point in those outer impressions. We see a landscape on the stage or on

the screen or in life and this visual perception is the cue which stirs

up in our memory or imagination any fitting ideas. The choice of them,

however, is completely controlled by our own interest and attitude and

by our previous experiences. Those memories and fancies are therefore

felt as our subjective supplements. We do not believe in their objective

reality. A suggestion, on the other hand, is forced on us. The outer

perception is not only a starting point but a controlling influence. The

associated idea is not felt as our creation but as something to which we

have to submit. The extreme case is, of course, that of the hypnotizer

whose word awakens in the mind of the hypnotized person ideas which he

cannot resist. He must accept them as real, he must believe that the

dreary room is a beautiful garden in which he picks flowers.

The spellbound audience in a theater or in a picture house is certainly

in a state of heightened suggestibility and is ready to receive

suggestions. One great and fundamental suggestion is working in both

cases, inasmuch as the drama as well as the photoplay suggests to the

mind of the spectator that this is more than mere play, that it is life

which we witness. But if we go further and ask for the application of

suggestions in the detailed action, we cannot overlook the fact that the

theater is extremely limited in its means. A series of events on the

stage may strongly force on the mind the prediction of something which

must follow, but inasmuch as the stage has to do with real physical

beings who must behave according to the laws of nature, it cannot avoid

offering us the actual events for which we were waiting. To be sure,

even on the stage the hero may talk, the revolver in his hand, until it

is fully suggested to us that the suicidal shot will end his life in the

next instant; and yet just then the curtain may fall, and only the

suggestion of his death may work in our mind. But this is evidently a

very exceptional case as a fall of the curtain means the ending of the

scene. In the act itself every series of events must come to its natural

ending. If two men begin to fight on the stage, nothing remains to be

suggested; we must simply witness the fight. And if two lovers embrace

each other, we have to see their caresses.

The photoplay can not only "cut back" in the service of memories, but

it can cut off in the service of suggestion. Even if the police did not

demand that actual crimes and suicides should never be shown on the

screen, for mere artistic reasons it would be wiser to leave the climax

to the suggestion to which the whole scene has led. There is no need of

bringing the series of pictures to its logical end, because they are

pictures only and not the real objects. At any instant the man may

disappear from the scene, and no automobile can race over the ground so

rapidly that it cannot be stopped just as it is to crash into the

rushing express train. The horseback rider jumps into the abyss; we see

him fall, and yet at the moment when he crashes to the ground we are

already in the midst of a far distant scene. Again and again with

doubtful taste the sensuality of the nickel audiences has been stirred

up by suggestive pictures of a girl undressing, and when in the intimate

chamber the last garment was touched, the spectators were suddenly in

the marketplace among crowds of people or in a sailing vessel on the

river. The whole technique of the rapid changes of scenes which we have

recognized as so characteristic of the photoplay involves at every end

point elements of suggestion which to a certain degree link the separate

scenes as the afterimages link the separate pictures.

CHAPTER VI

EMOTIONS

To picture emotions must be the central aim of the photoplay. In the

drama words of wisdom may be spoken and we may listen to the

conversations with interest even if they have only intellectual and not

emotional character. But the actor whom we see on the screen can hold

our attention only by what he is doing and his actions gain meaning and

unity for us through the feelings and emotions which control them. More

than in the drama the persons in the photoplay are to us first of all

subjects of emotional experiences. Their joy and pain, their hope and

fear, their love and hate, their gratitude and envy, their sympathy and

malice, give meaning and value to the play. What are the chances of the

photoartist to bring these feelings to a convincing expression?

No doubt, an emotion which is deprived of its discharge by words has

lost a strong element, and yet gestures, actions, and facial play are so

interwoven with the psychical process of an intense emotion that every

shade can find its characteristic delivery. The face alone with its

tensions around the mouth, with its play of the eye, with its cast of

the forehead, and even with the motions of the nostrils and the setting

of the jaw, may bring numberless shades into the feeling tone. Here

again the close-up can strongly heighten the impression. It is at the

climax of emotion on the stage that the theatergoer likes to use his

opera glass in order not to overlook the subtle excitement of the lips

and the passion of the eyeballs and the ghastly pupil and the quivering

cheeks. The enlargement by the close-up on the screen brings this

emotional action of the face to sharpest relief. Or it may show us

enlarged a play of the hands in which anger and rage or tender love or

jealousy speak in unmistakable language. In humorous scenes even the

flirting of amorous feet may in the close-up tell the story of their

possessors' hearts. Nevertheless there are narrow limits. Many emotional

symptoms like blushing or growing pale would be lost in the mere

photographic rendering, and, above all, these and many other signs of

feeling are not under voluntary control. The photoactors may carefully

go through the movements and imitate the contractions and relaxations of

the muscles, and yet may be unable to produce those processes which are

most essential for the true life emotion, namely those in the glands,

blood vessels, and involuntary muscles.

Certainly the going through the motions will shade consciousness

sufficiently so that some of these involuntary and instinctive responses

may set in. The actor really experiences something of the inner

excitement which he imitates and with the excitement the automatic

reactions appear. Yet only a few can actually shed tears, however much

they move the muscles of the face into the semblance of crying. The

pupil of the eye is somewhat more obedient, as the involuntary muscles

of the iris respond to the cue which a strong imagination can give, and

the mimic presentation of terror or astonishment or hatred may actually

lead to the enlargement or contraction of the pupil, which the close-up

may show. Yet there remains too much which mere art cannot render and

which life alone produces, because the consciousness of the unreality of

the situation works as a psychological inhibition on the automatic

instinctive responses. The actor may artificially tremble, or breathe

heavily, but the strong pulsation of the carotid artery or the moistness

of the skin from perspiration will not come with an imitated emotion. Of

course, that is true of the actor on the stage, too. But the content of

the words and the modulation of the voice can help so much that the

shortcomings of the visual impression are forgotten.

To the actor of the moving pictures, on the other hand, the temptation

offers itself to overcome the deficiency by a heightening of the

gestures and of the facial play, with the result that the emotional

expression becomes exaggerated. No friend of the photoplay can deny that

much of the photoart suffers from this almost unavoidable tendency. The

quick marchlike rhythm of the drama of the reel favors this artificial

overdoing, too. The rapid alternation of the scenes often seems to

demand a jumping from one emotional climax to another, or rather the

appearance of such extreme expressions where the content of the play

hardly suggests such heights and depths of emotion. The soft lights are

lost and the mental eye becomes adjusted to glaring flashes. This

undeniable defect is felt with the American actors still more than with

the European, especially with the French and Italian ones with whom

excited gestures and highly accentuated expressions of the face are

natural. A New England temperament forced into Neapolitan expressions of

hatred or jealousy or adoration too easily appears a caricature. It is

not by chance that so many strong actors of the stage are such more or

less decided failures on the screen. They have been dragged into an art

which is foreign to them, and their achievement has not seldom remained

far below that of the specializing photoactor. The habitual reliance on

the magic of the voice deprives them of the natural means of expression

when they are to render emotions without words. They give too little or

too much; they are not expressive, or they become grotesque.

Of course, the photoartist profits from one advantage. He is not obliged

to find the most expressive gesture in one decisive moment of the stage

performance. He can not only rehearse, but he can repeat the scene

before the camera until exactly the right inspiration comes, and the

manager who takes the close-up visage may discard many a poor pose

before he strikes that one expression in which the whole content of the

feeling of the scene is concentrated. In one other respect the producer

of the photoplay has a technical advantage. More easily than the stage

manager of the real theater he can choose actors whose natural build and

physiognomy fit the rôle and predispose them for the desired expression.

The drama depends upon professional actors; the photoplay can pick

players among any group of people for specific rôles. They need no art

of speaking and no training in delivery. The artificial make-up of the

stage actors in order to give them special character is therefore less

needed for the screen. The expression of the faces and the gestures must

gain through such natural fitness of the man for the particular rôle. If

the photoplay needs a brutal boxer in a mining camp, the producer will

not, like the stage manager, try to transform a clean, neat,

professional actor into a vulgar brute, but he will sift the Bowery

until he has found some creature who looks as if he came from that

mining camp and who has at least the prizefighter's cauliflower ear

which results from the smashing of the ear cartilage. If he needs the

fat bartender with his smug smile, or the humble Jewish peddler, or the

Italian organ grinder, he does not rely on wigs and paint; he finds them

all ready-made on the East Side. With the right body and countenance the

emotion is distinctly more credible. The emotional expression in the

photoplays is therefore often more natural in the small rôles which the

outsiders play than in the chief parts of the professionals who feel

that they must outdo nature.

But our whole consideration so far has been onesided and narrow. We have

asked only about the means by which the photoactor expresses his

emotion, and we were naturally confined to the analysis of his bodily

reactions. But while the human individual in our surroundings has hardly

any other means than the bodily expressions to show his emotions and

moods, the photoplaywright is certainly not bound by these limits. Yet

even in life the emotional tone may radiate beyond the body. A person

expresses his mourning by his black clothes and his joy by gay attire,

or he may make the piano or violin ring forth in happiness or moan in

sadness. Even his whole room or house may be penetrated by his spirit of

welcoming cordiality or his emotional setting of forbidding harshness.

The feeling of the soul emanates into the surroundings and the

impression which we get of our neighbor's emotional attitude may be

derived from this external frame of the personality as much as from the

gestures and the face.

This effect of the surrounding surely can and must be much heightened in

the artistic theater play. All the stage settings of the scene ought to

be in harmony with the fundamental emotions of the play, and many an act

owes its success to the unity of emotional impression which results from

the perfect painting of the background; it reverberates to the passions

of the mind. From the highest artistic color and form effects of the

stage in the Reinhardt style down to the cheapest melodrama with soft

blue lights and tender music for the closing scene, the stage

arrangements tell the story of the intimate emotion. But just this

additional expression of the feeling through the medium of the

surrounding scene, through background and setting, through lines and

forms and movements, is very much more at the disposal of the

photoartist. He alone can change the background and all the surroundings

of the acting person from instant to instant. He is not bound to one

setting, he has no technical difficulty in altering the whole scene with

every smile and every frown. To be sure, the theater can give us

changing sunshine and thunderclouds too. But it must go on at the slow

pace and with the clumsiness with which the events in nature pass. The

photoplay can flit from one to the other. Not more than one sixteenth of

a second is needed to carry us from one corner of the globe to the

other, from a jubilant setting to a mourning scene. The whole keyboard

of the imagination may be used to serve this emotionalizing of nature.

There is a girl in her little room, and she opens a letter and reads it.

There is no need of showing us in a close-up the letter page with the

male handwriting and the words of love and the request for her hand. We

see it in her radiant visage, we read it from her fascinated arms and

hands; and yet how much more can the photoartist tell us about the storm

of emotions in her soul. The walls of her little room fade away.

Beautiful hedges of hawthorn blossom around her, rose bushes in

wonderful glory arise and the whole ground is alive with exotic flowers.

Or the young artist sits in his attic playing his violin; we see the bow

moving over the strings but the dreamy face of the player does not

change with his music. Under the spell of his tones his features are

immovable as if they were staring at a vision. They do not speak of the

changing emotions which his melodies awake. We cannot hear those tones.

And yet we do hear them: a lovely spring landscape widens behind his

head, we see the valleys of May and the bubbling brooks and the young

wild beeches. And slowly it changes into the sadness of the autumn, the

sere leaves are falling around the player, heavy clouds hang low over

his head. Suddenly at a sharp accent of his bow the storm breaks, we are

carried to the wildness of rugged rocks or to the raging sea; and again

comes tranquillity over the world, the little country village of his

youth fills the background, the harvest is brought from the fields, the

sun sets upon a scene of happiness, and while the bow slowly sinks, the

walls and ceiling of his attic close in again. No shade, no tint, no hue

of his emotions has escaped us; we followed them as if we had heard the

rejoicing and the sadness, the storm and the peace of his melodious

tones. Such imaginative settings can be only the extreme; they would not

be fit for the routine play. But, however much weaker and fainter the

echo of the surroundings may be in the realistic pictures of the

standard photoplay, the chances are abundant everywhere and no skillful

playwright will ever disregard them entirely. Not the portrait of the

man but the picture as a whole has to be filled with emotional

exuberance.

Everything so far has referred to the emotions of the persons in the

play, but this cannot be sufficient. When we were interested in

attention and memory we did not ask about the act of attention and

memory in the persons of the play, but in the spectator, and we

recognized that these mental activities and excitements in the audience

were projected into the moving pictures. Just here was the center of

our interest, because it showed that uniqueness of the means with which

the photoplaywright can work. If we want to shape the question now in

the same way, we ought to ask how it is with the emotions of the

spectator. But then two different groups of cases must be distinguished.

On the one side we have those emotions in which the feelings of the

persons in the play are transmitted to our own soul. On the other side,

we find those feelings with which we respond to the scenes in the play,

feelings which may be entirely different, perhaps exactly opposite to

those which the figures in the play express.

The first group is by far the larger one. Our imitation of the emotions

which we see expressed brings vividness and affective tone into our

grasping of the play's action. We sympathize with the sufferer and that

means that the pain which he expresses becomes our own pain. We share

the joy of the happy lover and the grief of the despondent mourner, we

feel the indignation of the betrayed wife and the fear of the man in

danger. The visual perception of the various forms of expression of

these emotions fuses in our mind with the conscious awareness of the

emotion expressed; we feel as if we were directly seeing and observing

the emotion itself. Moreover the idea awakens in us the appropriate

reactions. The horror which we see makes us really shrink, the happiness

which we witness makes us relax, the pain which we observe brings

contractions in our muscles; and all the resulting sensations from

muscles, joints, tendons, from skin and viscera, from blood circulation

and breathing, give the color of living experience to the emotional

reflection in our mind. It is obvious that for this leading group of

emotions the relation of the pictures to the feelings of the persons in

the play and to the feelings of the spectator is exactly the same. If we

start from the emotions of the audience, we can say that the pain and

the joy which the spectator feels are really projected to the screen,

projected both into the portraits of the persons and into the pictures

of the scenery and background into which the personal emotions radiate.

The fundamental principle which we recognized for all the other mental

states is accordingly no less efficient in the case of the spectator's

emotions.

The analysis of the mind of the audience must lead, however, to that

second group of emotions, those in which the spectator responds to the

scenes on the film from the standpoint of his independent affective

life. We see an overbearing pompous person who is filled with the

emotion of solemnity, and yet he awakens in us the emotion of humor. We

answer by our ridicule. We see the scoundrel who in the melodramatic

photoplay is filled with fiendish malice, and yet we do not respond by

imitating his emotion; we feel moral indignation toward his personality.

We see the laughing, rejoicing child who, while he picks the berries

from the edge of the precipice, is not aware that he must fall down if

the hero does not snatch him back at the last moment. Of course, we feel

the child's joy with him. Otherwise we should not even understand his

behaviour, but we feel more strongly the fear and the horror of which

the child himself does not know anything. The photoplaywrights have so

far hardly ventured to project this second class of emotion, which the

spectator superadds to the events, into the show on the screen. Only

tentative suggestions can be found. The enthusiasm or the disapproval

or indignation of the spectator is sometimes released in the lights and

shades and in the setting of the landscape. There are still rich

possibilities along this line. The photoplay has hardly come to its own

with regard to these secondary emotions. Here it has not emancipated

itself sufficiently from the model of the stage. Those emotions arise,

of course, in the audience of a theater too, but the dramatic stage

cannot embody them. In the opera the orchestra may symbolize them. For

the photoplay, which is not bound to the physical succession of events

but gives us only the pictorial reflection, there is an unlimited field

for the expression of these attitudes in ourselves.

But the wide expansion of this field and of the whole manifoldness of

emotional possibilities in the moving pictures is not sufficiently

characterized as long as we think only of the optical representation in

the actual outer world. The camera men of the moving pictures have

photographed the happenings of the world and all its wonders, have gone

to the bottom of the sea and up to the clouds; they have surprised the

beasts in the jungles and in the Arctic ice; they have dwelt with the

lowest races and have captured the greatest men of our time: and they

are always haunted by the fear that the supply of new sensations may be

exhausted. Curiously enough, they have so far ignored the fact that an

inexhaustible wealth of new impressions is at their disposal, which has

hardly been touched as yet. There is a material and a formal side to the

pictures which we see in their rapid succession. The material side is

controlled by the content of what is shown to us. But the formal side

depends upon the outer conditions under which this content is exhibited.

Even with ordinary photographs we are accustomed to discriminate between

those in which every detail is very sharp and others, often much more

artistic, in which everything looks somewhat misty and blurring and in

which sharp outlines are avoided. We have this formal aspect, of course,

still more prominently if we see the same landscape or the same person

painted by a dozen different artists. Each one has his own style. Or, to

point to another elementary factor, the same series of moving pictures

may be given to us with a very slow or with a rapid turning of the

crank. It is the same street scene, and yet in the one case everyone on

the street seems leisurely to saunter along, while in the other case

there is a general rush and hurry. Nothing is changed but the temporal

form; and in going over from the sharp image to the blurring one,

nothing is changed but a certain spatial form: the content remains the

same.

As soon as we give any interest to this formal aspect of the

presentation, we must recognize that the photoplaywright has here

possibilities to which nothing corresponds in the world of the stage.

Take the case that we want to produce an effect of trembling. We might

use the pictures as the camera has taken them, sixteen in a second. But

in reproducing them on the screen we change their order. After giving

the first four pictures we go back to picture 3, then give 4, 5, 6, and

return to 5, then 6, 7, 8, and go back to 7, and so on. Any other

rhythm, of course, is equally possible. The effect is one which never

occurs in nature and which could not be produced on the stage. The

events for a moment go backward. A certain vibration goes through the

world like the tremolo of the orchestra. Or we demand from our camera a

still more complex service. We put the camera itself on a slightly

rocking support and then every point must move in strange curves and

every motion takes an uncanny whirling character. The content still

remains the same as under normal conditions, but the changes in the

formal presentation give to the mind of the spectator unusual sensations

which produce a new shading of the emotional background.

Of course, impressions which come to our eye can at first awaken only

sensations, and a sensation is not an emotion. But it is well known that

in the view of modern physiological psychology our consciousness of the

emotion itself is shaped and marked by the sensations which arise from

our bodily organs. As soon as such abnormal visual impressions stream

into our consciousness, our whole background of fusing bodily sensations

becomes altered and new emotions seem to take hold of us. If we see on

the screen a man hypnotized in the doctor's office, the patient himself

may lie there with closed eyes, nothing in his features expressing his

emotional setting and nothing radiating to us. But if now only the

doctor and the patient remain unchanged and steady, while everything in

the whole room begins at first to tremble and then to wave and to change

its form more and more rapidly so that a feeling of dizziness comes over

us and an uncanny, ghastly unnaturalness overcomes the whole surrounding

of the hypnotized person, we ourselves become seized by the strange

emotion. It is not worth while to go into further illustrations here, as

this possibility of the camera work still belongs entirely to the

future. It could not be otherwise as we remember that the whole moving

picture play arose from the slavish imitation of the drama and began

only slowly to find its own artistic methods. But there is no doubt that

the formal changes of the pictorial presentation will be legion as soon

as the photoartists give their attention to this neglected aspect.

The value of these formal changes for the expression of the emotions may

become remarkable. The characteristic features of many an attitude and

feeling which cannot be expressed without words today will then be

aroused in the mind of the spectator through the subtle art of the

camera.

PART II

THE ESTHETICS OF THE PHOTOPLAY