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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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