We recognized there that the photoplay, incomparable in this respect
with the drama, gave us a view of dramatic events which was completely
shaped by the inner movements of the mind. To be sure, the events in the
photoplay happen in the real space with its depth. But the spectator
feels that they are not presented in the three dimensions of the outer
world, that they are flat pictures which only the mind molds into
plastic things. Again the events are seen in continuous movement; and
yet the pictures break up the movement into a rapid succession of
instantaneous impressions. We do not see the objective reality, but a
product of our own mind which binds the pictures together. But much
stronger differences came to light when we turned to the processes of
attention, of memory, of imagination, of suggestion, of division of
interest and of emotion. The attention turns to detailed points in the
outer world and ignores everything else: the photoplay is doing exactly
this when in the close-up a detail is enlarged and everything else
disappears. Memory breaks into present events by bringing up pictures of
the past: the photoplay is doing this by its frequent cut-backs, when
pictures of events long past flit between those of the present. The
imagination anticipates the future or overcomes reality by fancies and
dreams; the photoplay is doing all this more richly than any chance
imagination would succeed in doing. But chiefly, through our division of
interest our mind is drawn hither and thither. We think of events which
run parallel in different places. The photoplay can show in intertwined
scenes everything which our mind embraces. Events in three or four or
five regions of the world can be woven together into one complex action.
Finally, we saw that every shade of feeling and emotion which fills the
spectator's mind can mold the scenes in the photoplay until they appear
the embodiment of our feelings. In every one of these aspects the
photoplay succeeds in doing what the drama of the theater does not
attempt.
If this is the outcome of esthetic analysis on the one side, of
psychological research on the other, we need only combine the results of
both into a unified principle: _the photoplay tells us the human story
by overcoming the forms of the outer world, namely, space, time, and
causality, and by adjusting the events to the forms of the inner world,
namely, attention, memory, imagination, and emotion._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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