THE PHOTOPLAY
A PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDY
BY
HUGO MÜNSTERBERG
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
NEW YORK LONDON
1916
CONTENTS
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.
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.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE
PHOTOPLAY
DEPTH AND MOVEMENT
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.
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.
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.
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.
THE ESTHETICS OF THE
PHOTOPLAY
THE PURPOSE OF ART
We have analyzed the mental functions
which are most powerful in the audience of
the photoplay. We studied the mere act of
perceiving the pictures on the screen, of
perceiving their apparently plastic character,
their depth, and their apparent movements.
We turned then to those psychical
acts by which we respond to the perceived
impressions. In the foreground stood
the act of attention, but then we followed
the play of associations, of memory, of
imagination, of suggestion, and, most important
of all, we traced the distribution of interest.
Finally we spoke of the feelings and
emotions with which we accompany the play.
Certainly all this does not exhaust the mental
reactions which arise in our mind when
we witness a drama of the film. We have not
spoken, for instance, of the action which the
plot of the story or its social background may
start in our soul. The suffering of the poor,
the injustice by which the weak may be forced
into the path of crime, and a hundred other
social motives may be impressed on us by the
photoplay; thoughts about human society,
about laws and reforms, about human differences
and human fates, may fill our mind.
Yet this is not one of the characteristic functions
of the moving pictures. It is a side
effect which may set in just as it may result
from reading the newspapers or from hearing
of practical affairs in life. But in all our
discussions we have also left out another
mental process, namely, esthetic emotion.
We did speak about the emotions which the
plot of the play stirs up. We discussed the
feelings in which we sympathize with the
characters of the scene, in which we share
their suffering and their joy; and we also
spoke about that other group of emotions by
which we take a mental attitude toward the
behaviour of the persons in the play. But
there is surely a third group of feelings and
emotions which we have not yet considered,
namely, those of our joy in the play, our
esthetic satisfaction or dissatisfaction. We
have omitted them intentionally, because the
study of this group of feelings involves a discussion
of the esthetic process as such, and
we have left all the esthetic problems for this
second part of our investigation.
If we disregard this pleasure or displeasure
in the beauty of the photoplay and
reflect only on the processes of perception,
attention, interest, memory, imagination,
suggestion, and emotion which we have
analyzed, we see that we everywhere come to
the same result. One general principle
seemed to control the whole mental mechanism
of the spectator, or rather the relation
between the mental mechanism and the pictures
on the screen. We recognized that in
every case the objective world of outer events
had been shaped and molded until it became
adjusted to the subjective movements of the
mind. The mind develops memory ideas and
imaginative ideas; in the moving pictures
they become reality. The mind concentrates
itself on a special detail in its act of attention;
and in the close-up of the moving pictures
this inner state is objectified. The
mind is filled with emotions; and by means
of the camera the whole scenery echoes them.
Even in the most objective factor of the mind,
the perception, we find this peculiar oscillation.
We perceive the movement; and yet
we perceive it as something which has not its
independent character as an outer world process,
because our mind has built it up from
single pictures rapidly following one another.
We perceive things in their plastic depth;
and yet again the depth is not that of the outer
world. We are aware of its unreality and
of the pictorial flatness of the impressions.
In every one of these features the contrast
to the mental impressions from the real stage
is obvious. There in the theater we know at
every moment that we see real plastic men
before us, that they are really in motion when
they walk and talk and that, on the other
hand, it is our own doing and not a part of
the play when our attention turns to this or
that detail, when our memory brings back
events of the past, when our imagination surrounds
them with fancies and emotions. And
here, it seems, we have a definite starting
point for an esthetic comparison. If we raise
the unavoidable question—how does the photoplay
compare with the drama?—we seem to
have sufficient material on hand to form an
esthetic judgment. The verdict, it appears,
can hardly be doubtful. Must we not say art
is imitation of nature? The drama can show
us on the stage a true imitation of real life.
The scenes proceed just as they would happen
anywhere in the outer world. Men of
flesh and blood with really plastic bodies
stand before us. They move like any moving
body in our surroundings. Moreover those
happenings on the stage, just like the events
in life, are independent of our subjective attention
and memory and imagination. They
go their objective course. Thus the theater
comes so near to its purpose of imitating the
world of men that the comparison with the
photoplay suggests almost a disastrous failure
of the art of the film. The color of the
world has disappeared, the persons are dumb,
no sound reaches our ear. The depth of the
scene appears unreal, the motion has lost its
natural character. Worst of all, the objective
course of events is falsified; our own attention
and memory and imagination have shifted
and remodeled the events until they look
as nature could never show them. What we
really see can hardly be called any longer an
imitation of the world, such as the theater
gives us.
When the graphophone repeats a Beethoven
symphony, the voluminousness of the
orchestra is reduced to a thin feeble surface
sound, and no one would accept this product
of the disk and the diaphragm as a full substitute
for the performance of the real orchestra.
But, after all, every instrument is
actually represented, and we can still discriminate
the violins and the celli and the
flutes in exactly the same order and tonal and
rhythmic relation in which they appear in the
original. The graphophone music appears,
therefore, much better fitted for replacing the
orchestra than the moving pictures are to be
a substitute for the theater. There all the
essential elements seem conserved; here just
the essentials seem to be lost and the aim of
the drama to imitate life with the greatest
possible reality seems hopelessly beyond the
flat, colorless pictures of the photoplay. Still
more might we say that the plaster of Paris
cast is a fair substitute for the marble statue.
It shares with the beautiful marble work the
same form and imitates the body of the living
man just as well as the marble statue. Moreover,
this product of the mechanical process
has the same white color which the original
work of the sculptor possesses. Hence we
must acknowledge it as a fair approach to the
plastic work of art. In the same way the
chromo print gives the essentials of the oil
painting. Everywhere the technical process
has secured a reproduction of the work of art
which sounds or looks almost like the work
of the great artist, and only the technique
of the moving pictures, which so clearly tries
to reproduce the theater performance, stands
so utterly far behind the art of the actor. Is
not an esthetic judgment of rejection demanded
by good taste and sober criticism?
We may tolerate the photoplay because, by
the inexpensive technical method which allows
an unlimited multiplication of the performances,
it brings at least a shadow of the
theater to the masses who cannot afford to
see real actors. But the cultivated mind
might better enjoy plaster of Paris casts and
chromo prints and graphophone music than
the moving pictures with their complete failure
to give us the essentials of the real stage.
We have heard this message, or if it was
not expressed in clear words it surely lingered
for a long while in the minds of all
those who had a serious relation to art. It
probably still prevails today among many,
even if they appreciate the more ambitious
efforts of the photoplaywrights in the most
recent years. The philanthropic pleasure in
the furnishing of cheap entertainment and the
recognition that a certain advance has recently
been made seem to alleviate the esthetic
situation, but the core of public opinion
remains the same; the moving pictures are
no real art.
And yet all this arguing and all this hasty
settling of a most complex problem is fundamentally
wrong. It is based on entirely mistaken
ideas concerning the aims and purposes
of art. If those errors were given up and
if the right understanding of the moving pictures
were to take hold of the community, nobody
would doubt that the chromo print and
the graphophone and the plaster cast are indeed
nothing but inexpensive substitutes for
art with many essential artistic elements left
out, and therefore ultimately unsatisfactory
to a truly artistic taste. But everybody
would recognize at the same time that the relation
of the photoplay to the theater is a
completely different one and that the difference
counts entirely in favor of the moving
pictures. They are not and ought never to be
imitations of the theater. They can never
give the esthetic values of the theater; but
no more can the theater give the esthetic
values of the photoplay. With the rise of the
moving pictures has come an entirely new
independent art which must develop its own
life conditions. The moving pictures would
indeed be a complete failure if that popular
theory of art which we suggested were right.
But that theory is wrong from beginning to
end, and it must not obstruct the way to a
better insight which recognizes that the stage
and the screen are as fundamentally different
as sculpture and painting, or as lyrics and
music. The drama and the photoplay are two
coördinated arts, each perfectly valuable in
itself. The one cannot replace the other; and
the shortcomings of the one as against the
other reflect only the fact that the one has a
history of fifteen years while the other has
one of five thousand. This is the thesis which
we want to prove, and the first step to it must
be to ask: what is the aim of art if not the
imitation of reality?
But can the claim that art imitates nature
or rather that imitation is the essence of art
be upheld if we seriously look over the field
of artistic creations? Would it not involve
the expectation that the artistic value would
be the greater, the more the ideal of imitation
is approached? A perfect imitation which
looks exactly like the original would give us
the highest art. Yet every page in the history
of art tells us the opposite. We admire the
marble statue and we despise as inartistic the
colored wax figures. There is no difficulty
in producing colored wax figures which look
so completely like real persons that the visitor
at an exhibit may easily be deceived and
may ask information from the wax man leaning
over the railing. On the other hand what
a tremendous distance between reality and
the marble statue with its uniform white surface!
It could never deceive us and as an
imitation it would certainly be a failure. Is
it different with a painting? Here the color
may be quite similar to the original, but unlike
the marble it has lost its depth and shows
us nature on a flat surface. Again we could
never be deceived, and it is not the painter's
ambition to make us believe for a moment that
reality is before us. Moreover neither the
sculptor nor the painter gives us less valuable
work when they offer us a bust or a painted
head only instead of the whole figure; and yet
we have never seen in reality a human body
ending at the chest. We admire a fine etching
hardly less than a painting. Here we have
neither the plastic effect of the sculpture nor
the color of the painting. The essential features
of the real model are left out. As an
imitation it would fail disastrously. What is
imitated in a lyric poem? Through more than
two thousand years we have appreciated the
works of the great dramatists who had their
personages speak in the rhythms of metrical
language. Every iambic verse is a deviation
from reality. If they had tried to imitate nature
Antigone and Hamlet would have spoken
the prose of daily life. Does a beautiful arch
or dome or tower of a building imitate any
part of reality? Is its architectural value
dependent upon the similarity to nature? Or
does the melody or harmony in music offer
an imitation of the surrounding world?
Wherever we examine without prejudice
the mental effects of true works of art in literature
or music, in painting or sculpture, in
decorative arts or architecture, we find that
the central esthetic value is directly opposed
to the spirit of imitation. A work of art may
and must start from something which
awakens in us the interests of reality and
which contains traits of reality, and to that
extent it cannot avoid some imitation. But
it becomes art just in so far as it overcomes
reality, stops imitating and leaves the imitated
reality behind it. It is artistic just in
so far as it does not imitate reality but
changes the world, selects from it special features
for new purposes, remodels the world
and is through this truly creative. To imitate
the world is a mechanical process; to
transform the world so that it becomes a thing
of beauty is the purpose of art. The highest
art may be furthest removed from reality.
We have not even the right to say that this
process of selection from reality means that
we keep the beautiful elements of it and simply
omit and eliminate the ugly ones. This
again is not in the least characteristic of art,
however often the popular mind may couple
this superficial idea with that other one, that
art consists of imitation. It is not true that
the esthetic value depends upon the beauty
of the selected material. The men and women
whom Rembrandt painted were not beautiful
persons. The ugliest woman may be the subject
of a most beautiful painting. The so-called
beautiful landscape may, of course, be
material for a beautiful landscape painting,
but the chances are great that such a pretty
vista will attract the dilettante and not the
real artist who knows that the true value of
his painting is independent of the prettiness
of the model. He knows that a muddy country
road or a dirty city street or a trivial
little pond may be the material for immortal
pictures. He who writes literature does not
select scenes of life which are beautiful in
themselves, scenes which we would have liked
to live through, full of radiant happiness and
joy; he does not eliminate from his picture
of life that which is disturbing to the peace
of the soul, repellant and ugly and immoral.
On the contrary, all the great works of literature
have shown us dark shades of life
beside the light ones. They have spoken of
unhappiness and pain as often as of joy. We
have suffered with our poets, and in so far as
the musical composer expresses the emotions
of life the great symphonies have been full of
pathos and tragedy. True art has always been
selection, but never selection of the beautiful
elements in outer reality.
But if the esthetic value is independent of
the imitative approach to reality and independent
of the elimination of unpleasant elements
or of the collection and addition of
pleasant traits, what does the artist really select
and combine in his creation? How does
he shape the world? How does nature look
when it has been remolded by the artistic
temperament and imagination? What is left
of the real landscape when the engraver's
needle has sketched it? What is left of the
tragic events in real life when the lyric poet
has reshaped them in a few rhymed stanzas?
Perhaps we may bring the characteristic features
of the process most easily to recognition
if we contrast them with another kind
of reshaping process. The same landscape
which the artist sketches, the same historic
event which the lyric poet interprets in his
verses, may be grasped by the human mind
in a wholly different way. We need only
think of the scientific work of the scholar.
He too may have the greatest interest in
the landscape which the engraver has rendered:
the tree on the edge of the rock, torn
by the storm, and at the foot of the cliff the
sea with its whitecapped waves. He too is
absorbed by the tragic death of a Lincoln.
But what is the scholar's attitude? Is it
his aim to reproduce the landscape or the
historic event? Certainly not. The meaning
of science and scholarship and of knowledge
in general would be completely misunderstood
if their aim were thought to be simply the
repeating of the special facts in reality. The
scientist tries to explain the facts, and even
his description is meant to serve his explanation.
He turns to that tree on the cliff with
the interest of studying its anatomical structure.
He examines with a microscope the
cells of those tissues in the branches and
leaves in order that he may explain the
growth of the tree and its development from
the germ. The storm which whips its
branches is to him a physical process for
which he seeks the causes, far removed. The
sea is to him a substance which he resolves
in his laboratory into its chemical elements
and which he explains by tracing the geological
changes on the surface of the earth.
In short, the scientist is not interested in
that particular object only, but in its connections
with the total universe. He explains
the event by a reference to general laws which
are effective everywhere. Every single
growth and movement is linked by him with
the endless chain of causes and effects. He
surely reshapes the experience in connecting
every single impression with the totality of
events, in finding the general in the particular,
in transforming the given facts into the
scientific scheme of an atomistic universe. It
is not different from the historical event. To
the scholarly historian the death of Lincoln
is meaningless if it is not seen in its relation
to and connection with the whole history of
the Civil War and if this again is not understood
as the result of the total development
of the United States. And who can understand
the growth of the United States, unless
the whole of modern history is seen as a
background and unless the ideas of state
philosophy which have built up the American
democracy are grasped in their connection
with the whole story of European political
thought in preceding centuries? The scholar
may turn to natural or to social events, to
waves or trees or men: every process and
action in the world gains interest for him only
by being connected with other things and
events. Every point which he marks is the
nodal point for numberless relations. To
grasp a fact in the sense of scholarly knowledge
means to see it in all its connections,
and the work of the scholar is not simply to
hold the fact as he becomes aware of it but
to trace the connections and to supplement
them by his thought until a completed system
of interrelated facts in science or in history
is established.
Now we are better prepared to recognize
the characteristic function of the artist. He
is doing exactly the opposite of what the
scholar is aiming at. Both are changing and
remolding the given thing or event in the
interest of their ideal aims. But the ideal
aim of beauty and art is in complete contrast
to the ideal aim of scholarly knowledge. The
scholar, we see, establishes connections by
which the special thing loses all character of
separateness. He binds it to all the remainder
of the physical and social universe. The
artist, on the contrary, cuts off every possible
connection. He puts his landscape into a
frame so that every possible link with the
surrounding world is severed. He places his
statue on a pedestal so that it cannot possibly
step into the room around it. He makes his
persons speak in verse so that they cannot
possibly be connected with the intercourse of
the day. He tells his story so that nothing
can happen after the last chapter. The work
of art shows us the things and events perfectly
complete in themselves, freed from all
connections which lead beyond their own
limits, that is, in perfect isolation.
Both the truth which the scholar discovers
and the beauty which the artist creates are
valuable; but it is now clear that the value in
both cases lies not in the mere repetition of
the offerings of reality. There is no reason
whatever for appreciating a mere imitation
or repetition of that which exists in the world.
Neither the scholar nor the artist could do
better than nature or history. The value in
both cases lies just in the deviation from reality
in the service of human desires and ideals.
The desire and ideal of the scholar is to give
us an interconnected world in which we understand
everything by its being linked with
everything else; and the desire and ideal of
the artist in every possible art is to give us
things which are freed from the connection
of the world and which stand before us complete
in themselves. The things of the outer
world have thousandfold ties with nature and
history. An object becomes beautiful when
it is delivered from these ties, and in order
to secure this result we must take it away
from the background of reality and reproduce
it in such a form that it is unmistakably different
from the real things which are enchained
by the causes and effects of nature.
Why does this satisfy us? Why is it valuable
to have a part of nature or life liberated
from all connection with the world? Why
does it make us happy to see anything in its
perfect isolation, an isolation which real life
seldom offers and which only art can give in
complete perfection? The motives which lead
us to value the product of the scholar are
easily recognized. He aims toward connection.
He reshapes the world until it appears
connected, because that helps us to foresee the
effects of every event and teaches us to master
nature so that we can use it for our practical
achievements. But why do we appreciate
no less the opposite work which the
artist is doing? Might we not answer that
this enjoyment of the artistic work results
from the fact that only in contact with an
isolated experience can we feel perfectly
happy? Whatever we meet in life or nature
awakes in us desires, impulses to action, suggestions
and questions which must be answered.
Life is a continuous striving. Nothing
is an end in itself and therefore nothing
is a source of complete rest. Everything is
a stimulus to new wishes, a source of new uneasiness
which longs for new satisfaction in
the next and again the next thing. Life
pushes us forward. Yet sometimes a touch
of nature comes to us; we are stirred by a
thrill of life which awakens plenty of impulses
but which offers satisfaction to all
these impulses in itself. It does not lead beyond
itself but contains in its own midst
everything which answers the questions,
which brings the desires to rest.
Wherever we meet such an offering of nature,
we call it beautiful. We speak of the
beautiful landscape, of the beautiful face.
And wherever we meet it in life, we speak of
love, of friendship, of peace, of harmony.
The word harmony may even cover both nature
and life. Wherever it happens that
every line and every curve and every color
and every movement in the landscape is so
harmonious with all the others that every suggestion
which one stirs up is satisfied by another,
there it is perfect and we are completely
happy in it. In the life relations of
love and friendship and peace, there is again
this complete harmony of thought and feeling
and will, in which every desire is satisfied.
If our own mind is in such flawless harmony,
we feel the true happiness which crowns our
life. Such harmony, in which every part is
the complete fulfillment of that which the
other parts demand, when nothing is suggested
which is not fulfilled in the midst of
the same experience, where nothing points
beyond and everything is complete in the offering
itself, must be a source of inexhaustible
happiness. To remold nature and life so
that it offers such complete harmony in itself
that it does not point beyond its own limits
but is an ultimate unity through the harmony
of its parts: this is the aim of the isolation
which the artist alone achieves. That restful
happiness which the beautiful landscape or
the harmonious life relation can furnish us
in blessed instants of our struggling life is
secured as a joy forever when the painter or
the sculptor, the dramatist or the poet, the
composer or the photoplaywright, recomposes
nature and life and shows us a unity which
does not lead beyond itself but is in itself
perfectly harmonious.
THE MEANS OF THE VARIOUS ARTS
We have sought the aim which underlies
all artistic creation and were led in this
search to paths which seem far away from
our special problem, the art of the photoplay.
Yet we have steadily come nearer to it. We
had to go the longer way because there can
be no other method to reach a decision concerning
the esthetic value and significance of
the photoplay. We must clearly see what art
in general aims at if we want to recognize
the relative standing of the film art and the
art of the theater. If we superficially accept
the popular idea that the value of the photoplay
is to be measured by the nearness with
which it approaches the standards of the real
theater and that the task of the theater is to
imitate life as closely as possible, the esthetic
condemnation of the photoplay is necessary.
The pictures on the screen then stand far
behind the actual playing on the stage in
every respect. But if we find that the aim
of art, including the dramatic art, is not to
imitate life but to reset it in a way which is
totally different from reality, then an entirely
new perspective is opened. The dramatic
way may then be only one of the artistic possibilities.
The kinematoscopic way may be
another, which may have entirely different
methods and yet may be just as valuable and
esthetically pure as the art of the theater.
The drama and the photoplay may serve the
purpose of art with equal sincerity and perfection
and may reach the same goal with
sharply contrasting means. Our next step,
which brings us directly to the threshold of
the photoplayhouse, is, accordingly, to study
the difference of the various methods which
the different arts use for their common purpose.
What characterizes a particular art
as such? When we have recognized the
special traits of the traditional arts we shall
be better prepared to ask whether the methods
of the photoplay do not characterize this
film creation also as a full-fledged art, coördinated
with the older forms of beauty.
We saw that the aim of every art is to isolate
some object of experience in nature or
social life in such a way that it becomes complete
in itself, and satisfies by itself every
demand which it awakens. If every desire
which it stimulates is completely fulfilled by
its own parts, that is, if it is a complete harmony,
we, the spectators, the listeners, the
readers, are perfectly satisfied, and this complete
satisfaction is the characteristic esthetic
joy. The first demand which is involved in
this characterization of art is that the offering
of the artist shall really awaken interests,
as only a constant stirring up of desires
together with their constant fulfillment keeps
the flame of esthetic enjoyment alive. When
nothing stirs us, when nothing interests us,
we are in a state of indifference outside the
realm of art. This also separates the esthetic
pleasure from the ordinary selfish pleasures
of life. They are based on the satisfaction
of desires, too, but a kind of satisfaction
through which the desire itself disappears.
The pleasure in a meal, to be sure, can have
its esthetic side, as often the harmony of the
tastes and odors and sights of a rich feast
may be brought to a certain artistic perfection.
But mere pleasure in eating has no
esthetic value, as the object is destroyed by
the partaking and not only the cake disappears
but also our desire for the cake when
the desire is fulfilled and we are satiated. The
work of art aims to keep both the demand
and its fulfillment forever awake.
But then this stirring up of interests demands
more than anything else a careful
selection of those features in reality which
ought to be admitted into the work of art.
A thousand traits of the landscape are trivial
and insignificant and most of what happens
in the social life around us, even where a
great action is going on, is in itself commonplace
and dull and without consequences for
the event which stirs us. The very first requirement
for the artistic creation is therefore
the elimination of the indifferent, the
selection of those features of the complex
offering of nature or social life which tell the
real story, which express the true emotional
values and which suggest the interest for
everything which is involved in this particular
episode of the world. But this leads on
to the natural consequence, that the artist
must not only select the important traits, but
must artificially heighten their power and increase
their strength. We spoke of the landscape
with the tree on the rock and the roaring
surf, and we saw how the scientist studies
its smallest elements, the cells of the tree, the
molecules of the seawater and of the rock.
How differently does the artist proceed! He
does not care even for the single leaves which
the photographer might reproduce. If a
painter renders such a landscape with his
masterly brush, he gives us only the leading
movements of those branches which the storm
tears, and the great swing in the curve of the
wave. But those forceful lines of the billows,
those sharp contours of the rock, contain
everything which expresses their spirit.
It is not different with the author who
writes a historical novel or drama. Every
man's life is crowded with the trivialities of
the day. The scholarly historian may have
to look into them; the artist selects those
events in his hero's life which truly express
his personality and which are fit to sustain
the significant plot. The more he brings
those few elements out of the many into sharp
relief, the more he stimulates our interest and
makes us really feel with the persons of his
novel or drama. The sculptor even selects
one single position. He cannot, like the
painter, give us any background, he cannot
make his hero move as on the theater stage.
The marble statue makes the one position of
the hero everlasting, but this is so selected
that all the chance aspects and fleeting gestures
of the real man appear insignificant
compared with the one most expressive and
most characteristic position which is chosen.
However far this selection of the essential
traits removes the artistic creation from the
mere imitative reproduction of the world, a
much greater distance from reality results
from a second need if the work is to fulfill
the purposes of art. We saw that we have
art only when the work is isolated, that is,
when it fulfills every demand in itself and
does not point beyond itself. This can be
done only if it is sharply set off from the
sphere of our practical interests. Whatever
enters into our practical sphere links itself
with our impulses to real action and the action
would involve a change, an intrusion, an
influence from without. As long as we have
the desire to change anything, the work is not
complete in itself. The relation of the work
to us as persons must not enter into our
awareness of it at all. As soon as it does,
that complete restfulness of the esthetic enjoyment
is lost. Then the object becomes
simply a part of our practical surroundings.
The fundamental condition of art, therefore,
is that we shall be distinctly conscious of the
unreality of the artistic production, and that
means that it must be absolutely separated
from the real things and men, that it must
be isolated and kept in its own sphere. As
soon as a work of art tempts us to take it as
a piece of reality, it has been dragged into
the sphere of our practical action, which
means our desire to put ourselves into connection
with it. Its completeness in itself
is lost and its value for our esthetic enjoyment
has faded away.
Now we understand why it is necessary
that each art should have its particular
method for fundamentally changing reality.
Now we recognize that it is by no means a
weakness of sculpture that the marble statue
has not the colors of life but a whiteness unlike
any human being. Nor does it appear a
deficiency in the painting or the drawing that
it can offer two dimensions only and has no
means to show us the depth of real nature.
Now we grasp why the poet expresses his
feelings and thoughts in the entirely unnatural
language of rhythms and rhymes. Now
we see why every work of art has its frame
or its base or its stage. Everything serves
that central purpose, the separation of the
offered experience from the background of
our real life. When we have a painted garden
before us, we do not want to pick the
flowers from the beds and break the fruit
from the branches. The flatness of the picture
tells us that this is no reality, in spite
of the fact that the size of the painting may
not be different from that of the windowpane
through which we see a real garden. We have
no thought of bringing a chair or a warm coat
for the woman in marble. The work which
the sculptor created stands before us in a
space into which we cannot enter, and because
it is entirely removed from the reality
toward which our actions are directed we become
esthetic spectators only. The smile of
the marble girl wins us as if it came from a
living one, but we do not respond to her welcome.
Just as she appears in her marble
form she is complete in herself without any
relation to us or to anyone else. The very
difference from reality has given her that self-sustained
perfect life.
If we read in a police report about burglaries,
we may lock our house more securely;
if we read about a flood, we may send our
mite; if we read about an elopement, we may
try to find out what happened later. But if
we read about all these in a short story, we
have esthetic enjoyment only if the author
somehow makes it perfectly clear to us by the
form of the description that this burglary
and flood and elopement do not belong to our
real surroundings and exist only in the world
of imagination. The extreme case comes to
us in the theater performance. We see there
real human beings a few feet from us; we see
in the melodrama how the villain approaches
his victim from behind with a dagger; we
feel indignation and anger: and yet we have
not the slightest desire to jump up on the
stage and stay his arm. The artificial setting
of the stage, the lighted proscenium before
the dark house, have removed the whole action
from the world which is connected with
our own deeds. The consciousness of unreality,
which the theater has forced on us, is the
condition for our dramatic interest in the
events presented. If we were really deceived
and only for a moment took the stage quarrel
and stage crime to be real, we would at once
be removed from the height of esthetic joy
to the level of common experience.
We must take one step more. We need not
only the complete separation from reality by
the changed forms of experience, but we must
demand also that this unreal thing or event
shall be complete in itself. The artist, therefore,
must do whatever is needed to satisfy
the demands which any part awakens. If one
line in the painting suggests a certain mood
and movement, the other lines must take it
up and the colors must sympathize with it and
they all must agree with the pictured content.
The tension which one scene in the drama
awakens must be relieved by another. Nothing
must remain unexplained and nothing unfinished.
We do not want to know what is
going on behind the hills of the landscape
painting or what the couple in the comedy
will do after the engagement in the last act.
On the other hand, if the artist adds elements
which are in harmony with the demands of
the other parts, they are esthetically valuable,
however much they may differ from the
actual happenings in the outer world. In the
painting the mermaid may have her tail and
the sculptured child may have his angel wings
and fairies may appear on the stage. In short,
every demand which is made by the purpose
of true art removes us from reality and is
contrary to the superficial claim that art
ought to rest on skillful imitation. The true
victory of art lies in the overcoming of the
real appearance and every art is genuine
which fulfills this esthetic desire for history
or for nature, in its own way.
The number of ways cannot be determined
beforehand. By the study of painting and
etching and drawing merely, we could not
foresee that there is also possible an art like
sculpture, and by studying epic and lyric
poetry we could not construct beforehand the
forms of the drama. The genius of mankind
had to discover ever new forms in which the
interest in reality is conserved and yet the
things and events are so completely changed
that they are separated from all possible reality,
isolated from all connections and made
complete in themselves. We have not yet
spoken about the one art which gives us this
perfect satisfaction in the isolated material,
satisfies every demand which it awakens, and
yet which is further removed from the reality
we know than any other artistic creation,
music. Those tones with which the composer
builds up his melodies and harmonies are not
parts of the world in which we live at all.
None of our actions in practical life is related
to tones from musical instruments, and yet
the tones of a symphony may arouse in us the
deepest emotions, the most solemn feelings
and the most joyful ones. They are symbols
of our world which bring with them its sadness
and its happiness. We feel the rhythm
of the tones, fugitive, light and joyful, or
quiet, heavy and sustained, and they impress
us as energies which awaken our own impulses,
our own tensions and relaxations.
We enter into the play of those tones which
with their intervals and their instrumental
tone color appear like a wonderful mosaic
of agreements and disagreements. Yet each
disagreement resolves itself into a new
agreement. Those tones seek one another.
They have a life of their own, complete in
itself. We do not want to change it. Our
mind simply echoes their desires and their
satisfaction. We feel with them and are
happy in their ultimate agreement without
which no musical melody would be beautiful.
Bound by the inner law which is proclaimed
by the first tones every coming tone is prepared.
The whole tone movement points
toward the next one. It is a world of inner
self-agreement like that of the colors in a
painting, of the curves in a work of sculpture,
like the rhythms and rhymes in a stanza. But
beyond the mere self-agreement of the tones
and rhythms as such, the musical piece as a
whole unveils to us a world of emotion. Music
does not depict the physical nature which fine
arts bring to us, nor the social world which
literature embraces, but the inner world with
its abundance of feelings and excitements.
It isolates our inner experience and within
its limits brings it to that perfect self-agreement
which is the characteristic of every art.
We might easily trace further the various
means by which each particular art overcomes
the chaos of the world and renders a part of
it in a perfectly isolated form in which all
elements are in mutual agreement. We might
develop out of this fundamental demand of
art all the special forms which are characteristic
in its various fields. We might also turn
to the applied arts, to architecture, to arts
and crafts, and so on and see how new rules
must arise from the combination of purely
artistic demands and those of practical utility.
But this would lead us too far into esthetic
theory, while our aim is to push forward
toward the problem of the photoplay.
Of painting, of drama, and of music we had
to speak because with them the photoplay
does share certain important conditions and
accordingly certain essential forms of rendering
the world. Each element of the photoplay
is a picture, flat like that which the painter
creates, and the pictorial character is fundamental
for the art of the film. But surely
the photoplay shares many conditions with
the drama on the stage. The presentation
of conflicting action among men in dramatic
scenes is the content, on the stage as on the
screen. Our chief claim, however, was that
we falsify the meaning of the photoplay if we
simply subordinate it to the esthetic conditions
of the drama. It is different from mere
pictures and it is different from the drama,
too, however much relation it has to both.
But we come nearer to the understanding of
its true position in the esthetic world, if we
think at the same time of that other art upon
which we touched, the art of the musical
tones. They have overcome the outer world
and the social world entirely, they unfold our
inner life, our mental play, with its feelings
and emotions, its memories and fancies, in a
material which seems exempt from the laws
of the world of substance and material, tones
which are fluttering and fleeting like our own
mental states. Of course, a photoplay is not
a piece of music. Its material is not sound
but light. But the photoplay is not music
in the same sense in which it is not drama
and not pictures. It shares something with
all of them. It stands somewhere among and
apart from them and just for this reason it
is an art of a particular type which must be
understood through its own conditions and
for which its own esthetic rules must be
traced instead of drawing them simply from
the rules of the theater.
THE MEANS OF THE PHOTOPLAY
We have now reached the point at which
we can knot together all our threads, the
psychological and the esthetic ones. If we
do so, we come to the true thesis of this
whole book. Our esthetic discussion showed
us that it is the aim of art to isolate a significant
part of our experience in such a way
that it is separate from our practical life and
is in complete agreement within itself. Our
esthetic satisfaction results from this inner
agreement and harmony, but in order that
we may feel such agreement of the parts we
must enter with our own impulses into the
will of every element, into the meaning of
every line and color and form, every word
and tone and note. Only if everything is
full of such inner movement can we really enjoy
the harmonious coöperation of the parts.
The means of the various arts, we saw, are
the forms and methods by which this aim
is fulfilled. They must be different for every
material. Moreover the same material may
allow very different methods of isolation and
elimination of the insignificant and reënforcement
of that which contributes to the
harmony. If we ask now what are the characteristic
means by which the photoplay succeeds
in overcoming reality, in isolating a
significant dramatic story and in presenting
it so that we enter into it and yet keep it
away from our practical life and enjoy the
harmony of the parts, we must remember
all the results to which our psychological discussion
in the first part of the book has led
us.
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.
We shall gain our orientation most directly
if once more, under this point of view, we
compare the photoplay with the performance
on the theater stage. We shall not enter
into a discussion of the character of the regular
theater and its drama. We take this for
granted. Everybody knows that highest art
form which the Greeks created and which
from Greece has spread over Asia, Europe,
and America. In tragedy and in comedy
from ancient times to Ibsen, Rostand, Hauptmann,
and Shaw we recognize one common
purpose and one common form for which no
further commentary is needed. How does
the photoplay differ from a theater performance?
We insisted that every work of art
must be somehow separated from our sphere
of practical interests. The theater is no exception.
The structure of the theater itself,
the framelike form of the stage, the difference
of light between stage and house, the
stage setting and costuming, all inhibit in
the audience the possibility of taking the
action on the stage to be real life. Stage
managers have sometimes tried the experiment
of reducing those differences, for instance,
keeping the audience also in a fully
lighted hall, and they always had to discover
how much the dramatic effect was reduced
because the feeling of distance from reality
was weakened. The photoplay and the
theater in this respect are evidently alike.
The screen too suggests from the very start
the complete unreality of the events.
But each further step leads us to remarkable
differences between the stage play and
the film play. In every respect the film play
is further away from the physical reality
than the drama and in every respect this
greater distance from the physical world
brings it nearer to the mental world. The
stage shows us living men. It is not the real
Romeo and not the real Juliet; and yet the
actor and the actress have the ringing voices
of true people, breathe like them, have living
colors like them, and fill physical space like
them. What is left in the photoplay? The
voice has been stilled: the photoplay is a
dumb show. Yet we must not forget that this
alone is a step away from reality which has
often been taken in the midst of the dramatic
world. Whoever knows the history of the
theater is aware of the tremendous rôle which
the pantomime has played in the development
of mankind. From the old half-religious
pantomimic and suggestive dances out of
which the beginnings of the real drama grew
to the fully religious pantomimes of medieval
ages and, further on, to many silent mimic
elements in modern performances, we find a
continuity of conventions which make the
pantomime almost the real background of all
dramatic development. We know how popular
the pantomimes were among the Greeks,
and how they stood in the foreground in the
imperial period of Rome. Old Rome cherished
the mimic clowns, but still more the tragic
pantomimics. "Their very nod speaks, their
hands talk and their fingers have a voice."
After the fall of the Roman empire the church
used the pantomime for the portrayal of sacred
history, and later centuries enjoyed very
unsacred histories in the pantomimes of their
ballets. Even complex artistic tragedies
without words have triumphed on our present-day
stage. "L'Enfant Prodigue" which
came from Paris, "Sumurun" which came
from Berlin, "Petroushka" which came from
Petrograd, conquered the American stage;
and surely the loss of speech, while it increased
the remoteness from reality, by no
means destroyed the continuous consciousness
of the bodily existence of the actors.
Moreover the student of a modern pantomime
cannot overlook a characteristic difference
between the speechless performance on
the stage and that of the actors of a photoplay.
The expression of the inner states, the
whole system of gestures, is decidedly different:
and here we might say that the photoplay
stands nearer to life than the pantomime. Of
course, the photoplayer must somewhat exaggerate
the natural expression. The whole
rhythm and intensity of his gestures must be
more marked than it would be with actors
who accompany their movements by spoken
words and who express the meaning of their
thoughts and feelings by the content of what
they say. Nevertheless the photoplayer uses
the regular channels of mental discharge. He
acts simply as a very emotional person might
act. But the actor who plays in a pantomime
cannot be satisfied with that. He is expected
to add something which is entirely unnatural,
namely a kind of artificial demonstration of
his emotions. He must not only behave like
an angry man, but he must behave like a man
who is consciously interested in his anger and
wants to demonstrate it to others. He exhibits
his emotions for the spectators. He
really acts theatrically for the benefit of the
bystanders. If he did not try to do so, his
means of conveying a rich story and a real
conflict of human passions would be too
meager. The photoplayer, with the rapid
changes of scenes, has other possibilities of
conveying his intentions. He must not yield
to the temptation to play a pantomime on the
screen, or he will seriously injure the artistic
quality of the reel.
The really decisive distance from bodily
reality, however, is created by the substitution
of the actor's picture for the actor himself.
Lights and shades replace the manifoldness
of color effects and mere perspective
must furnish the suggestion of depth. We
traced it when we discussed the psychology
of kinematoscopic perception. But we must
not put the emphasis on the wrong point.
The natural tendency might be to lay the
chief stress on the fact that those people in
the photoplay do not stand before us in flesh
and blood. The essential point is rather that
we are conscious of the flatness of the picture.
If we were to see the actors of the stage in a
mirror, it would also be a reflected image
which we perceive. We should not really
have the actors themselves in our straight
line of vision; and yet this image would appear
to us equivalent to the actors themselves,
because it would contain all the depth
of the real stage. The film picture is such a
reflected rendering of the actors. The process
which leads from the living men to the
screen is more complex than a mere reflection
in a mirror, but in spite of the complexity in
the transmission we do, after all, see the real
actor in the picture. The photograph is absolutely
different from those pictures which
a clever draughtsman has sketched. In the
photoplay we see the actors themselves and
the decisive factor which makes the impression
different from seeing real men is not
that we see the living persons through
the medium of photographic reproduction but
that this reproduction shows them in a flat
form. The bodily space has been eliminated.
We said once before that stereoscopic
arrangements could reproduce somewhat this
plastic form also. Yet this would seriously
interfere with the character of the photoplay.
We need there this overcoming of the depth,
we want to have it as a picture only and yet
as a picture which strongly suggests to us the
actual depth of the real world. We want to
keep the interest in the plastic world and
want to be aware of the depth in which the
persons move, but our direct object of perception
must be without the depth. That
idea of space which forces on us most
strongly the idea of heaviness, solidity and
substantiality must be replaced by the light
flitting immateriality.
But the photoplay sacrifices not only the
space values of the real theater; it disregards
no less its order of time. The theater presents
its plot in the time order of reality. It
may interrupt the continuous flow of time
without neglecting the conditions of the dramatic
art. There may be twenty years
between the third and the fourth act, inasmuch
as the dramatic writer must select those
elements spread over space and time which
are significant for the development of his
story. But he is bound by the fundamental
principle of real time, that it can move only
forward and not backward. Whatever the
theater shows us now must come later in the
story than that which it showed us in any
previous moment. The strict classical
demand for complete unity of time does not fit
every drama, but a drama would give up its
mission if it told us in the third act something
which happened before the second act.
Of course, there may be a play within a play,
and the players on the stage which is set on
the stage may play events of old Roman history
before the king of France. But this is
an enclosure of the past in the present, which
corresponds exactly to the actual order of
events. The photoplay, on the other hand,
does not and must not respect this temporal
structure of the physical universe. At any
point the photoplay interrupts the series and
brings us back to the past. We studied this
unique feature of the film art when we spoke
of the psychology of memory and imagination.
With the full freedom of our fancy, with
the whole mobility of our association of
ideas, pictures of the past flit through the
scenes of the present. Time is left behind.
Man becomes boy; today is interwoven with
the day before yesterday. The freedom of
the mind has triumphed over the unalterable
law of the outer world.
It is interesting to watch how playwrights
nowadays try to steal the thunder of the photoplay
and experiment with time reversals
on the legitimate stage. We are esthetically
on the borderland when a grandfather tells
his grandchild the story of his own youth as
a warning, and instead of the spoken words
the events of his early years come before our
eyes. This is, after all, quite similar to a play
within a play. A very different experiment
is tried in "Under Cover." The third act,
which plays on the second floor of the house,
ends with an explosion. The fourth act,
which plays downstairs, begins a quarter of
an hour before the explosion. Here we have
a real denial of a fundamental condition of
the theater. Or if we stick to recent products
of the American stage, we may think
of "On Trial," a play which perhaps comes
nearest to a dramatic usurpation of the rights
of the photoplay. We see the court scene and
as one witness after another begins to give
his testimony the courtroom is replaced by
the scenes of the actions about which the witness
is to report. Another clever play, "Between
the Lines," ends the first act with a
postman bringing three letters from the
three children of the house. The second,
third, and fourth acts lead us to the three
different homes from which the letters came
and the action in the three places not only
precedes the writing of the letters; but goes
on at the same time. The last act, finally,
begins with the arrival of the letters which
tell the ending of those events in the three
homes. Such experiments are very suggestive
but they are not any longer pure
dramatic art. It is always possible to mix
arts. An Italian painter produces very striking
effects by putting pieces of glass and
stone and rope into his paintings, but they
are no longer pure paintings. The drama in
which the later event comes before the earlier
is an esthetic barbarism which is entertaining
as a clever trick in a graceful superficial
play, but intolerable in ambitious dramatic
art. It is not only tolerable but perfectly natural
in any photoplay. The pictorial reflection
of the world is not bound by the rigid
mechanism of time. Our mind is here and
there, our mind turns to the present and then
to the past: the photoplay can equal it in
its freedom from the bondage of the material
world.
But the theater is bound not only by space
and time. Whatever it shows is controlled
by the same laws of causality which govern
nature. This involves a complete continuity
of the physical events: no cause without following
effect, no effect without preceding
cause. This whole natural course is left behind
in the play on the screen. The deviation
from reality begins with that resolution of
the continuous movement which we studied
in our psychological discussions. We saw
that the impression of movement results from
an activity of the mind which binds the separate
pictures together. What we actually see
is a composite; it is like the movement of a
fountain in which every jet is resolved into
numberless drops. We feel the play of those
drops in their sparkling haste as one continuous
stream of water, and yet are conscious
of the myriads of drops, each one separate
from the others. This fountainlike spray of
pictures has completely overcome the causal
world.
In an entirely different form this triumph
over causality appears in the interruption of
the events by pictures which belong to another
series. We find this whenever the scene suddenly
changes. The processes are not carried
to their natural consequences. A movement
is started, but before the cause brings its results
another scene has taken its place. What
this new scene brings may be an effect for
which we saw no causes. But not only the
processes are interrupted. The intertwining
of the scenes which we have traced in detail
is itself such a contrast to causality. It is
as if different objects could fill the same
space at the same time. It is as if the resistance
of the material world had disappeared
and the substances could penetrate one another.
In the interlacing of our ideas we experience
this superiority to all physical laws.
The theater would not have even the technical
means to give us such impressions, but if it
had, it would have no right to make use of
them, as it would destroy the basis on which
the drama is built. We have only another
case of the same type in those series of pictures
which aim to force a suggestion on our
mind. We have spoken of them. A certain
effect is prepared by a chain of causes and
yet when the causal result is to appear the
film is cut off. We have the causes without
the effect. The villain thrusts with his dagger—but
a miracle has snatched away his victim.
While the moving pictures are lifted above
the world of space and time and causality and
are freed from its bounds, they are certainly
not without law. We said before that the
freedom with which the pictures replace one
another is to a large degree comparable to
the sparkling and streaming of the musical
tones. The yielding to the play of the mental
energies, to the attention and emotion,
which is felt in the film pictures, is still more
complete in the musical melodies and harmonies
in which the tones themselves are
merely the expressions of the ideas and feelings
and will impulses of the mind. Their
harmonies and disharmonies, their fusing and
blending, is not controlled by any outer necessity,
but by the inner agreement and disagreement
of our free impulses. And yet in
this world of musical freedom, everything is
completely controlled by esthetic necessities.
No sphere of practical life stands under such
rigid rules as the realm of the composer.
However bold the musical genius may be he
cannot emancipate himself from the iron rule
that his work must show complete unity in itself.
All the separate prescriptions which the
musical student has to learn are ultimately
only the consequences of this central demand
which music, the freest of the arts,
shares with all the others. In the case of the
film, too, the freedom from the physical forms
of space, time, and causality does not mean
any liberation from this esthetic bondage
either. On the contrary, just as music is surrounded
by more technical rules than literature,
the photoplay must be held together by
the esthetic demands still more firmly than is
the drama. The arts which are subordinated
to the conditions of space, time, and causality
find a certain firmness of structure in these
material forms which contain an element of
outer connectedness. But where these forms
are given up and where the freedom of mental
play replaces their outer necessity, everything
would fall asunder if the esthetic unity
were disregarded.
This unity is, first of all, the unity of action.
The demand for it is the same which we know
from the drama. The temptation to neglect
it is nowhere greater than in the photoplay
where outside matter can so easily be introduced
or independent interests developed.
It is certainly true for the photoplay,
as for every work of art, that nothing
has the right to existence in its midst which
is not internally needed for the unfolding of
the unified action. Wherever two plots are
given to us, we receive less by far than if we
had only one plot. We leave the sphere of
valuable art entirely when a unified action
is ruined by mixing it with declamation, and
propaganda which is not organically interwoven
with the action itself. It may be still
fresh in memory what an esthetically intolerable
helter-skelter performance was offered to
the public in "The Battlecry of Peace." Nothing
can be more injurious to the esthetic cultivation
of the people than such performances
which hold the attention of the spectators by
ambitious detail and yet destroy their esthetic
sensibility by a complete disregard of the
fundamental principle of art, the demand for
unity. But we recognized also that this unity
involves complete isolation. We annihilate
beauty when we link the artistic creation with
practical interests and transform the spectator
into a selfishly interested bystander.
The scenic background of the play is not presented
in order that we decide whether we
want to spend our next vacation there. The
interior decoration of the rooms is not exhibited
as a display for a department store.
The men and women who carry out the action
of the plot must not be people whom we may
meet tomorrow on the street. All the threads
of the play must be knotted together in the
play itself and none should be connected with
our outside interests. A good photoplay
must be isolated and complete in itself like a
beautiful melody. It is not an advertisement
for the newest fashions.
This unity of action involves unity of characters.
It has too often been maintained by
those who theorize on the photoplay that the
development of character is the special task
of the drama, while the photoplay, which lacks
words, must be satisfied with types. Probably
this is only a reflection of the crude state
which most photoplays of today have not outgrown.
Internally, there is no reason why
the means of the photoplay should not allow
a rather subtle depicting of complex character.
But the chief demand is that the characters
remain consistent, that the action be
developed according to inner necessity and
that the characters themselves be in harmony
with the central idea of the plot. However, as
soon as we insist on unity we have no right to
think only of the action which gives the content
of the play. We cannot make light of the
form. As in music the melody and rhythms
belong together, as in painting not every
color combination suits every subject, and as
in poetry not every stanza would agree with
every idea, so the photoplay must bring action
and pictorial expression into perfect harmony.
But this demand repeats itself in
every single picture. We take it for granted
that the painter balances perfectly the forms
in his painting, groups them so that an internal
symmetry can be felt and that the lines
and curves and colors blend into a unity.
Every single picture of the sixteen thousand
which are shown to us in one reel ought to be
treated with this respect of the pictorial artist
for the unity of the forms.
The photoplay shows us a significant conflict
of human actions in moving pictures
which, freed from the physical forms of
space, time, and causality, are adjusted to
the free play of our mental experiences and
which reach complete isolation from the practical
world through the perfect unity of plot
and pictorial appearance.
THE DEMANDS OF THE PHOTOPLAY
We have found the general formula for the
new art of the photoplay. We may turn our
attention to some consequences which are involved
in this general principle and to some
esthetic demands which result from it. Naturally
the greatest of all of them is the one
for which no specific prescription can be
given, namely the imaginative talent of the
scenario writer and the producer. The new
art is in that respect not different from all
the old arts. A Beethoven writes immortal
symphonies; a thousand conductors are writing
symphonies after the same pattern and
after the same technical rules and yet not one
survives the next day. What the great
painter or sculptor, composer or poet, novelist
or dramatist, gives from the depth of his
artistic personality is interesting and significant;
and the unity of form and content is
natural and perfect. What untalented amateurs
produce is trivial and flat; the relation
of form and content is forced; the unity of
the whole is incomplete. Between these two
extremes any possible degree of approach to
the ideal is shown in the history of human
arts. It cannot be otherwise with the art of
the film. Even the clearest recognition of the
specific demands of the photoplay cannot be
sufficient to replace original talent or genius.
The most slavish obedience to esthetic demands
cannot make a tiresome plot interesting
and a trivial action significant.
If there is anything which introduces a
characteristic element into the creation of
the photoplay as against all other arts, it may
be found in the undeniable fact that the
photoplay always demands the coöperation of
two inventive personalities, the scenario
writer and the producer. Some collaboration
exists in other arts too. The opera demands
the poet and the composer; and yet the text
of the opera is a work of literature independent
and complete in itself, and the music of
the opera has its own life. Again, every
musical work demands the performer. The
orchestra must play the symphonies, the
pianist or the singer must make the melodies
living, the actors must play the drama. But
the music is a perfect work of art even before
it is sung or played on an instrument, just as
a drama is complete as a work of literature
even if it never reaches the stage. Moreover
it is evident that the realization by actors
is needed for the photoplay too. But we may
disregard that. What we have in mind is
that the work which the scenario writer
creates is in itself still entirely imperfect and
becomes a complete work of art only through
the action of the producer. He plays a rôle
entirely different from that of the mere stage
manager in the drama. The stage manager
carries out what the writer of the drama prescribes,
however much his own skill and
visual imagination and insight into the demands
of the characters may add to the embodiment
of the dramatic action. But the
producer of the photoplay really must show
himself a creative artist, inasmuch as he is
the one who actually transforms the plays
into pictures. The emphasis in the drama
lies on the spoken word, to which the stage
manager does not add anything. It is all contained
in the lines. In the photoplay the
whole emphasis lies on the picture and its
composition is left entirely to the producing
artist.
But the scenario writer must not only have
talent for dramatic invention and construction;
he must be wide awake to the uniqueness
of his task, that is, he must feel at every
moment that he is writing for the screen and
not for the stage or for a book. And this
brings us back to our central argument. He
must understand that the photoplay is not a
photographed drama, but that it is controlled
by psychological conditions of its own. As
soon as it is grasped that the film play is not
simply a mechanical reproduction of another
art but is an art of a special kind, it follows
that talents of a special kind must be devoted
to it and that nobody ought to feel it beneath
his artistic dignity to write scenarios in the
service of this new art. No doubt the moving
picture performances today still stand on a
low artistic level. Nine tenths of the plays
are cheap melodramas or vulgar farces. The
question is not how much larger a percentage
of really valuable dramas can be
found in our theaters. Many of their plays
are just as much an appeal to the lowest instincts.
But at least the theater is not forced
to be satisfied with such degrading comedies
and pseudotragedies. The world literature
of the stage contains an abundance of works
of eternal value. It is a purely social and
not an esthetic question, why the theaters
around the "White Way" yield to the vulgar
taste instead of using the truly beautiful
drama for the raising of the public mind. The
moving picture theaters face an entirely different
situation. Their managers may have
the best intentions to give better plays; and
yet they are unable to do so because the scenario
literature has so far nothing which can
be compared with the master works of the
drama; and nothing of this higher type can
be expected or hoped for until the creation of
photoplays is recognized as worthy of the
highest ideal endeavor.
Nobody denies that the photoplay shares
the characteristic features of the drama.
Both depend upon the conflict of interests
and of acts. These conflicts, tragic or comic,
demand a similar development and solution
on the stage and on the screen. A mere
showing of human activity without will conflict
might give very pleasant moving pictures
of idyllic or romantic character or perhaps
of practical interest. The result would
be a kind of lyric or epic poem on the screen,
or a travelogue or what not, but it would
never shape itself into a photoplay as long as
that conflict of human interests which the
drama demands was lacking. Yet, as this
conflict of will is expressed in the one case by
living speaking men, in the other by moving
pictures, the difference in the artistic conception
must surely be as great as the similarity.
Hence one of the supreme demands must be
for an original literature of real power and
significance, in which every thought is generated
by the idea of the screen. As long as
the photoplays are fed by the literature of
the stage, the new art can never come to its
own and can never reach its real goal. It is
surely no fault of Shakespeare that Hamlet
and King Lear are very poor photoplays. If
ever a Shakespeare arises for the screen, his
work would be equally unsatisfactory if it
were dragged to the stage. Peer Gynt is no
longer Ibsen's if the actors are dumb.
The novel, in certain respects, fares still
worse, but in other respects some degrees
better. It is true that in the superficial literature
written for the hour the demarcation
line between dramatic and narrative works is
often ignored. The best sellers of the novel
counter are often warmed over into successful
theater plays, and no society play with a
long run on Broadway escapes its transformation
into a serial novel for the newspapers.
But where literature is at its height, the deep
difference can be felt distinctly. The epic
art, including the novel, traces the experiences
and the development of a character,
while the drama is dependent upon the conflict
of character. Mere adventures of a personality
are never sufficient for a good drama
and are not less unsatisfactory for the plot of
a photoplay. In the novel the opposing characters
are only a part of the social background
which is needed to show the life story
of the hero or heroine. They have not the
independent significance which is essential
for the dramatic conflict. The novel on the
screen, if it is a true novel and not the novelistic
rendering of what is really a dramatic
plot, must be lifeless and uninspiring. But
on the other hand the photoplay much more
than the drama emphasizes the background
of human action, and it shares this trait with
the novel. Both the social and the natural
backgrounds are the real setting for the development
of the chief character in the story.
These features can easily be transferred to
the photoplay and for this reason some picturized
novels have had the advantage over
the photoplay cut from the drama. The only
true conclusion must remain, however, that
neither drama nor novel is sufficient for the
film scenarios. The photopoet must turn to
life itself and must remodel life in the
artistic forms which are characteristic of his
particular art. If he has truly grasped the
fundamental meaning of the screen world, his
imagination will guide him more safely than
his reminiscences of dramas which he has
seen on the stage and of novels which he has
read.
If we turn to a few special demands which
are contained in such a general postulate for
a new artistic method, we naturally think at
once of the rôle of words. The drama and
novel live by words. How much of this
noblest vehicle of thought can the photoplay
conserve in its domain? We all know what
a large part of the photoplay today is told us
by the medium of words and phrases. How
little would we know what those people are
talking about if we saw them only acting and
had not beforehand the information which
the "leader" supplies. The technique differs
with different companies. Some experiment
with projecting the spoken words into the
picture itself, bringing the phrase in glaring
white letters near the head of the person who
is speaking, in a way similar to the methods
of the newspaper cartoonists. But mostly
the series of the pictures is interrupted and
the decisive word taken directly from the lips
of the hero, or an explanatory statement
which gives meaning to the whole is thrown
on the screen. Sometimes this may be a concession
to the mentally less trained members
of the audience, but usually these printed
comments are indispensable for understanding
the plot, and even the most intelligent
spectator would feel helpless without these
frequent guideposts. But this habit of the
picture houses today is certainly not an
esthetic argument. They are obliged to yield
to the scheme simply because the scenario
writers are still untrained and clumsy in using
the technique of the new art.
Some religious painters of medieval times
put in the picture itself phrases which the
persons were supposed to speak, as if the
words were leaving their mouths. But we
could not imagine Raphael and Michelangelo
making use of a method of communication
which is so entirely foreign to the real spirit
of painting. Every art grows slowly to the
point where the artist relies on its characteristic
and genuine forms of expression. Elements
which do not belong to it are at first
mingled in it and must be slowly eliminated.
The photoplay of the day after tomorrow will
surely be freed from all elements which are
not really pictures. The beginning of the
photoplay as a mere imitation of the theater
is nowhere so evident as in this inorganic
combination with bits of dialogue or explanatory
phrases. The art of words and the art
of pictures are there forcibly yoked together.
Whoever writes his scenarios so that the pictures
cannot be understood without these linguistic
crutches is an esthetic failure in the
new art. The next step toward the emancipation
of the photoplay decidedly must be
the creation of plays which speak the
language of pictures only.
Two apparent exceptions seem justified. It
is not contrary to the internal demands of the
film art if a complete scene has a title. A
leader like "The Next Morning" or "After
Three Years" or "In South Africa" or "The
First Step" or "The Awakening" or "Among
Friends" has the same character as the title
of a painting in a picture gallery. If we
read in our catalogue of paintings that a picture
is called "Landscape" or "Portrait" we
feel the words to be superfluous. If we read
that its title is "London Bridge in Mist" or
"Portrait of the Pope" we receive a valuable
suggestion which is surely not without influence
on our appreciation of the picture, and
yet it is not an organic part of the painting
itself. In this sense a leader as title for a
scene or still better for a whole reel may be
applied without any esthetic objection. The
other case which is not only possible but perfectly
justified is the introduction of letters,
telegrams, posters, newspaper clippings, and
similar printed or written communications
in a pictorial close-up the enlargement of
which makes every word readable. This
scheme is more and more introduced into the
plays today and the movement is in a proper
direction. The words of the telegram or of
the signboard and even of the cutting from
the newspaper are parts of the reality which
the pictures are to show us and their meaning
does not stand outside but within the pictorial
story. The true artist will make sparing use
of this method in order that the spectator may
not change his attitude. He must remain in
an inner adjustment to pictorial forms and
must not switch over into an adaptation to
sentences. But if its use is not exaggerated,
the method is legitimate, in striking contrast
to the inartistic use of the same words as
leaders between the pictures.
The condemnation of guiding words, in the
interest of the purity of the picture play as
such, also leads to earnest objection to phonographic
accompaniments. Those who, like
Edison, had a technical, scientific, and social
interest but not a genuine esthetic point of
view in the development of the moving pictures
naturally asked themselves whether
this optical imitation of the drama might not
be improved by an acoustical imitation too.
Then the idea would be to connect the kinematoscope
with the phonograph and to synchronize
them so completely that with every
visible movement of the lips the audible sound
of the words would leave the diaphragm of
the apparatus. All who devoted themselves
to this problem had considerable difficulties
and when their ventures proved practical
failures with the theater audiences, they were
inclined to blame their inability to solve the
technical problem perfectly. They were not
aware that the real difficulty was an esthetic
and internal one. Even if the voices were
heard with ideal perfection and exactly in
time with the movements on the screen, the
effect on an esthetically conscientious audience
would have been disappointing. A
photoplay cannot gain but only lose if its
visual purity is destroyed. If we see and hear
at the same time, we do indeed come nearer
to the real theater, but this is desirable only
if it is our goal to imitate the stage. Yet if
that were the goal, even the best imitation
would remain far inferior to an actual theater
performance. As soon as we have clearly
understood that the photoplay is an art in itself,
the conservation of the spoken word is
as disturbing as color would be on the clothing
of a marble statue.
It is quite different with accompanying
music. Even if the music in the overwhelming
majority of cases were not so pitifully
bad as it is in most of the picture theaters of
today, no one would consider it an organic
part of the photoplay itself, like the singing
in the opera. Yet the need of such a more or
less melodious and even more or less harmonious
accompaniment has always been felt,
and even the poorest substitute for decent
music has been tolerated, as seeing long reels
in a darkened house without any tonal accompaniment
fatigues and ultimately irritates an
average audience. The music relieves the
tension and keeps the attention awake. It
must be entirely subordinated and it is a fact
that most people are hardly aware of the
special pieces which are played, while they
would feel uncomfortable without them. But
it is not at all necessary for the music to be
limited to such harmonious smoothing of the
mind by rhythmical tones. The music can
and ought to be adjusted to the play on the
screen. The more ambitious picture corporations
have clearly recognized this demand
and show their new plays with exact suggestions
for the choice of musical pieces to be
played as accompaniment. The music does
not tell a part of the plot and does not replace
the picture as words would do, but simply reënforces
the emotional setting. It is quite
probable, when the photoplay art has found
its esthetic recognition, that composers will
begin to write the musical score for a beautiful
photoplay with the same enthusiasm
with which they write in other musical forms.
Just between the intolerable accompaniment
by printed or spoken words on the one side
and the perfectly welcome rendering of emotionally
fitting music on the other, we find the
noises with which the photoplay managers
like to accompany their performances. When
the horses gallop, we must hear the hoofbeats,
if rain or hail is falling, if the lightning
flashes, we hear the splashing or the thunderstorm.
We hear the firing of a gun, the whistling
of a locomotive, ships' bells, or the ambulance
gong, or the barking dog, or the noise
when Charlie Chaplin falls downstairs. They
even have a complicated machine, the "allefex,"
which can produce over fifty distinctive
noises, fit for any photoplay emergency. It
will probably take longer to rid the photoplay
of these appeals to the imagination than
the explanations of the leaders, but ultimately
they will have to disappear too. They have
no right to existence in a work of art which
is composed of pictures. In so far as they
are simply heightening the emotional tension,
they may enter into the music itself, but in
so far as they tell a part of the story, they
ought to be ruled out as intrusions from another
sphere. We might just as well improve
the painting of a rose garden by bathing it in
rose perfume in order that the spectators
might get the odor of the roses together with
the sight of them. The limitations of an art
are in reality its strength and to overstep its
boundaries means to weaken it.
It may be more open to discussion whether
this same negative attitude ought to be taken
toward color in the photoplay. It is well-known
what wonderful technical progress has
been secured by those who wanted to catch
the color hues and tints of nature in their
moving pictures. To be sure, many of the
prettiest effects in color are even today produced
by artificial stencil methods. Photographs
are simply printed in three colors like
any ordinary color print. The task of cutting
those many stencils for the thousands of pictures
on a reel is tremendous, and yet these
difficulties have been overcome. Any desired
color effect can be obtained by this method
and the beauty of the best specimens is unsurpassed.
But the difficulty is so great that it
can hardly become a popular method. The
direct photographing of the colors themselves
will be much simpler as soon as the method is
completely perfected. It can hardly be said
that this ideal has been reached today. The
successive photographing through three red,
green, and violet screens and the later projection
of the pictures through screens of
these colors seemed scientifically the best approach.
Yet it needed a multiplication of
pictures per second which offered extreme
difficulty, besides an extraordinary increase
of expense. The practical advance seems
more secure along the line of the so-called
"kinemacolor." Its effects are secured
by the use of two screens only,
not quite satisfactory, as true blue impressions
have to suffer and the reddish and
greenish ones are emphasized. Moreover the
eye is sometimes disturbed by big flashes of
red or green light. Yet the beginnings are
so excellent that the perfect solution of the
technical problem may be expected in the
near future. Would it be at the same time
a solution of the esthetic problem?
It has been claimed by friends of color
photography that at the present stage of
development natural color photography is unsatisfactory
for a rendering of outer events
because any scientific or historical happening
which is reproduced demands exactly the
same colors which reality shows. But on the
other hand the process seems perfectly sufficient
for the photoplay because there no objective
colors are expected and it makes no
difference whether the gowns of the women
or the rugs on the floor show the red and
green too vividly and the blue too faintly.
From an esthetic point of view we ought to
come to exactly the opposite verdict. For the
historical events even the present technical
methods are on the whole satisfactory. The
famous British coronation pictures were
superb and they gained immensely by the rich
color effects. They gave much more than a
mere photograph in black and white, and the
splendor and glory of those radiant colors
suffered little from the suppression of the
bluish tones. They were not shown in order
to match the colors in a ribbon store. For
the news pictures of the day the "kinemacolor"
and similar schemes are excellent. But
when we come to photoplays the question is
no longer one of technique; first of all we
stand before the problem: how far does the
coloring subordinate itself to the aim of the
photoplay? No doubt the effect of the individual
picture would be heightened by the
beauty of the colors. But would it heighten
the beauty of the photoplay? Would not this
color be again an addition which oversteps
the essential limits of this particular art? We
do not want to paint the cheeks of the Venus
of Milo: neither do we want to see the coloring
of Mary Pickford or Anita Stewart.
We became aware that the unique task of the
photoplay art can be fulfilled only by a far-reaching
disregard of reality. The real human
persons and the real landscapes must
be left behind and, as we saw, must be transformed
into pictorial suggestions only. We
must be strongly conscious of their pictorial
unreality in order that that wonderful play
of our inner experiences may be realized on
the screen. This consciousness of unreality
must seriously suffer from the addition of
color. We are once more brought too near to
the world which really surrounds us with the
richness of its colors, and the more we approach
it the less we gain that inner freedom,
that victory of the mind over nature, which
remains the ideal of the photoplay. The
colors are almost as detrimental as the voices.
On the other hand the producer must be
careful to keep sufficiently in contact with
reality, as otherwise the emotional interests
upon which the whole play depends would be
destroyed. We must not take the people to
be real, but we must link with them all the
feelings and associations which we would
connect with real men. This is possible only
if in their flat, colorless, pictorial setting they
share the real features of men. For this reason
it is important to suggest to the spectator
the impression of natural size. The demand
of the imagination for the normal size
of the persons and things in the picture is so
strong that it easily and constantly overcomes
great enlargements or reductions. We see
at first a man in his normal size and then by
a close-up an excessive enlargement of his
head. Yet we do not feel it as if the person
himself were enlarged. By a characteristic
psychical substitution we feel rather that we
have come nearer to him and that the size of
the visual image was increased by the decreasing
of the distance. If the whole picture
is so much enlarged that the persons are continually
given much above normal size, by a
psychical inhibition we deceive ourselves
about the distance and believe that we are
much nearer to the screen than we actually
are. Thus we instinctively remain under the
impression of normal appearances. But this
spell can easily be broken and the esthetic
effect is then greatly diminished. In the
large picture houses in which the projecting
camera is often very far from the screen, the
dimensions of the persons in the pictures may
be three or four times larger than human
beings. The illusion is nevertheless perfect,
because the spectator misjudges the distances
as long as he does not see anything in the
neighborhood of the screen. But if the eye
falls upon a woman playing the piano directly
below the picture, the illusion is destroyed.
He sees on the screen enormous giants whose
hands are as large as half the piano player,
and the normal reactions which are the spring
for the enjoyment of the play are suppressed.
The further we go into details, the more we
might add such special psychological demands
which result from the fundamental principles
of the new art. But it would be misleading if
we were also to raise demands concerning
a point which has often played the
chief rôle in the discussion, namely, the selection
of suitable topics. Writers who have
the unlimited possibilities of trick pictures
and film illusions in mind have proclaimed
that the fairy tale with its magic wonders
ought to be its chief domain, as no theater
stage could enter into rivalry. How many
have enjoyed "Neptune's Daughter"—the
mermaids in the surf and the sudden change
of the witch into the octopus on the shore and
the joyful play of the watersprites! How
many have been bewitched by Princess Nicotina
when she trips from the little cigar box
along the table! No theater could dare to
imitate such raptures of imagination. Other
writers have insisted on the superb chances
for gorgeous processions and the surging
splendor of multitudes. We see thousands
in Sherman's march to the sea. How hopeless
would be any attempt to imitate it on the
stage! When the toreador fights the bull and
the crowds in the Spanish arena enter into
enthusiastic frenzy, who would compare it
with those painted people in the arena when
the opera "Carmen" is sung. Again others
emphasize the opportunity for historical
plays or especially for plays with unusual
scenic setting where the beauties of the
tropics or of the mountains, of the ocean or
of the jungle, are brought into living contact
with the spectator. Biblical dramas with
pictures of real Palestine, classical plots with
real Greece or Rome as a background, have
stirred millions all over the globe. Yet the
majority of authors claim that the true field
for the photoplay is the practical life which
surrounds us, as no artistic means of literature
or drama can render the details of life
with such convincing sincerity and with such
realistic power. These are the slums, not
seen through the spectacles of a littérateur
or the fancy of an outsider but in their whole
abhorrent nakedness. These are the dark
corners of the metropolis where crime is hidden
and where vice is growing rankly.
They all are right; and at the same time
they all are wrong when they praise one at the
expense of another. Realistic and idealistic,
practical and romantic, historical and modern
topics are fit material for the art of the photoplay.
Its world is as unlimited as that of literature,
and the same is true of the style of
treatment. The humorous, if it is true humor,
the tragic, if it is true tragedy, the gay and
the solemn, the merry and the pathetic, the
half-reel and the five-reel play, all can fulfill
the demands of the new art.
THE FUNCTION OF THE PHOTOPLAY
Enthusiasts claim that in the United
States ten million people daily are attending
picture houses. Sceptics believe that "only"
two or three millions form the daily attendance.
But in any case "the movies" have become
the most popular entertainment of the
country, nay, of the world, and their influence
is one of the strongest social energies of our
time. Signs indicate that this popularity and
this influence are increasing from day to day.
What are the causes, and what are the effects
of this movement which was undreamed of
only a short time ago?
The economists are certainly right when
they see the chief reason for this crowding
of picture houses in the low price of admission.
For five or ten cents long hours of
thrilling entertainment in the best seats of
the house: this is the magnet which must be
more powerful than any theater or concert.
Yet the rush to the moving pictures is steadily
increasing, while the prices climb up. The
dime became a quarter, and in the last two
seasons ambitious plays were given before
audiences who paid the full theater rates.
The character of the audiences, too, suggests
that inexpensiveness alone cannot be decisive.
Six years ago a keen sociological observer
characterized the patrons of the picture palaces
as "the lower middle class and the massive
public, youths and shopgirls between adolescence
and maturity, small dealers, pedlars,
laborers, charwomen, besides the small quota
of children." This would be hardly a correct
description today. This "lower middle class"
has long been joined by the upper middle
class. To be sure, our observer of that long
forgotten past added meekly: "Then there
emerges a superior person or two like yourself
attracted by mere curiosity and kept in
his seat by interest until the very end of the
performance; this type sneers aloud to proclaim
its superiority and preserve its self-respect,
but it never leaves the theater until it
must." Today you and I are seen there quite
often, and we find that our friends have been
there, that they have given up the sneering
pose and talk about the new photoplay as a
matter of course.
Above all, even those who are drawn by
the cheapness of the performance would
hardly push their dimes under the little
window so often if they did not really enjoy
the plays and were not stirred by a pleasure
which holds them for hours. After all, it
must be the content of the performances
which is decisive of the incomparable triumph.
We have no right to conclude from
this that only the merits and excellences are
the true causes of their success. A caustic
critic would probably suggest that just the
opposite traits are responsible. He would
say that the average American is a mixture
of business, ragtime, and sentimentality. He
satisfies his business instinct by getting so
much for his nickel, he enjoys his ragtime in
the slapstick humor, and gratifies his sentimentality
with the preposterous melodramas
which fill the program. This is quite true,
and yet it is not true at all. Success has
crowned every effort to improve the photostage;
the better the plays are the more the
audience approves them. The most ambitious
companies are the most flourishing ones.
There must be inner values which make the
photoplay so extremely attractive and even
fascinating.
To a certain degree the mere technical
cleverness of the pictures even today holds
the interest spellbound as in those early days
when nothing but this technical skill could
claim the attention. We are still startled by
every original effect, even if the mere showing
of movement has today lost its impressiveness.
Moreover we are captivated by the
undeniable beauty of many settings. The
melodrama may be cheap; yet it does not
disturb the cultured mind as grossly as a
similar tragic vulgarity would on the real
stage, because it may have the snowfields of
Alaska or the palm trees of Florida as radiant
background. An intellectual interest, too,
finds its satisfaction. We get an insight into
spheres which were strange to us. Where
outlying regions of human interest are shown
on the theater stage, we must usually be satisfied
with some standardized suggestion. Here
in the moving pictures the play may really
bring us to mills and factories, to farms and
mines, to courtrooms and hospitals, to castles
and palaces in any land on earth.
Yet a stronger power of the photoplay
probably lies in its own dramatic qualities.
The rhythm of the play is marked by
unnatural rapidity. As the words are
absent which, in the drama as in life,
fill the gaps between the actions, the gestures
and deeds themselves can follow one another
much more quickly. Happenings which
would fill an hour on the stage can hardly fill
more than twenty minutes on the screen. This
heightens the feeling of vitality in the spectator.
He feels as if he were passing through
life with a sharper accent which stirs his personal
energies. The usual make-up of the
photoplay must strengthen this effect inasmuch
as the wordlessness of the picture
drama favors a certain simplification of the
social conflicts. The subtler shades of the
motives naturally demand speech. The later
plays of Ibsen could hardly be transformed
into photoplays. Where words are missing
the characters tend to become stereotyped
and the motives to be deprived of their complexity.
The plot of the photoplay is usually
based on the fundamental emotions which are
common to all and which are understood by
everybody. Love and hate, gratitude and
envy, hope and fear, pity and jealousy, repentance
and sinfulness, and all the similar
crude emotions have been sufficient for the
construction of most scenarios. The more
mature development of the photoplay will
certainly overcome this primitive character,
as, while such an effort to reduce human life
to simple instincts is very convenient for the
photoplay, it is not at all necessary. In any
case where this tendency prevails it must help
greatly to excite and to intensify the personal
feeling of life and to stir the depths of the
human mind.
But the richest source of the unique satisfaction
in the photoplay is probably that esthetic
feeling which is significant for the new
art and which we have understood from its
psychological conditions. The massive outer
world has lost its weight, it has been freed
from space, time, and causality, and it has
been clothed in the forms of our own consciousness.
The mind has triumphed over
matter and the pictures roll on with the ease
of musical tones. It is a superb enjoyment
which no other art can furnish us. No wonder
that temples for the new goddess are built in
every little hamlet.
The intensity with which the plays take
hold of the audience cannot remain without
strong social effects. It has even been reported
that sensory hallucinations and illusions
have crept in; neurasthenic persons are
especially inclined to experience touch or
temperature or smell or sound impressions
from what they see on the screen. The associations
become as vivid as realities, because
the mind is so completely given up to the
moving pictures. The applause into which
the audiences, especially of rural communities,
break out at a happy turn of the melodramatic
pictures is another symptom of the
strange fascination. But it is evident that
such a penetrating influence must be fraught
with dangers. The more vividly the impressions
force themselves on the mind, the more
easily must they become starting points for
imitation and other motor responses. The
sight of crime and of vice may force itself
on the consciousness with disastrous results.
The normal resistance breaks down and the
moral balance, which would have been kept
under the habitual stimuli of the narrow routine
life, may be lost under the pressure of the
realistic suggestions. At the same time the
subtle sensitiveness of the young mind may
suffer from the rude contrasts between the
farces and the passionate romances which
follow with benumbing speed in the darkened
house. The possibilities of psychical infection
and destruction cannot be overlooked.
Those may have been exceptional cases only
when grave crimes have been traced directly
back to the impulses from unwholesome
photoplays, but no psychologist can determine
exactly how much the general spirit of righteousness,
of honesty, of sexual cleanliness and
modesty, may be weakened by the unbridled
influence of plays of low moral standard. All
countries seem to have been awakened to this
social danger. The time when unsavory
French comedies poisoned youth lies behind
us. A strong reaction has set in and the leading
companies among the photoplay producers
fight everywhere in the first rank for
suppression of the unclean. Some companies
even welcome censorship provided that it is
high-minded and liberal and does not confuse
artistic freedom with moral licentiousness.
Most, to be sure, seem doubtful whether the
new movement toward Federal censorship is
in harmony with American ideas on the freedom
of public expression.
But while the sources of danger cannot be
overlooked, the social reformer ought to focus
his interest still more on the tremendous influences
for good which may be exerted by
the moving pictures. The fact that millions
are daily under the spell of the performances
on the screen is established. The high degree
of their suggestibility during those hours in
the dark house may be taken for granted.
Hence any wholesome influence emanating
from the photoplay must have an incomparable
power for the remolding and upbuilding
of the national soul. From this point of view
the boundary lines between the photoplay and
the merely instructive moving pictures with
the news of the day or the magazine articles
on the screen become effaced. The intellectual,
the moral, the social, and the esthetic culture
of the community may be served by all of
them. Leading educators have joined in endorsing
the foundation of a Universal Culture
Lyceum. The plan is to make and circulate
moving pictures for the education of the
youth of the land, picture studies in science,
history, religion, literature, geography, biography,
art, architecture, social science, economics
and industry. From this Lyceum
"schools, churches and colleges will be furnished
with motion pictures giving the latest
results and activities in every sphere capable
of being pictured."
But, however much may be achieved by
such conscious efforts toward education, the
far larger contribution must be made by the
regular picture houses which the public seeks
without being conscious of the educational
significance. The teaching of the moving pictures
must not be forced on a more or less
indifferent audience, but ought to be absorbed
by those who seek entertainment and enjoyment
from the films and are ready to make
their little economic sacrifice.
The purely intellectual part of this uplift
is the easiest. Not only the news pictures and
the scientific demonstrations but also the
photoplays can lead young and old to ever
new regions of knowledge. The curiosity and
the imagination of the spectators will follow
gladly. Yet even in the intellectual sphere
the dangers must not be overlooked. They
are not positive. It is not as in the moral
sphere where the healthy moral impulse is
checked by the sight of crimes which stir up
antisocial desires. The danger is not that the
pictures open insight into facts which ought
not to be known. It is not the dangerous
knowledge which must be avoided, but it is
the trivializing influence of a steady contact
with things which are not worth knowing.
The larger part of the film literature of today
is certainly harmful in this sense. The
intellectual background of most photoplays is
insipid. By telling the plot without the subtle
motivation which the spoken word of the
drama may bring, not only do the characters
lose color but all the scenes and situations are
simplified to a degree which adjusts them to
a thoughtless public and soon becomes intolerable
to an intellectually trained spectator.
They force on the cultivated mind that
feeling which musical persons experience in
the musical comedies of the day. We hear the
melodies constantly with the feeling of having
heard them ever so often before. This
lack of originality and inspiration is not
necessary; it does not lie in the art form.
Offenbach and Strauss and others have
written musical comedies which are classical.
Neither does it lie in the form of the photoplay
that the story must be told in that insipid,
flat, uninspired fashion. Nor is it necessary
in order to reach the millions. To appeal
to the intelligence does not mean to
presuppose college education. Moreover the
differentiation has already begun. Just as
the plays of Shaw or Ibsen address a different
audience from that reached by the "Old
Homestead" or "Ben Hur," we have already
photoplays adapted to different types, and
there is not the slightest reason to connect
with the art of the screen an intellectual flabbiness.
It would be no gain for intellectual
culture if all the reasoning were confined to
the so-called instructive pictures and the
photoplays were served without any intellectual
salt. On the contrary, the appeal of
those strictly educational lessons may be less
deep than the producers hope, because the untrained
minds, especially of youth and of the
uneducated audiences, have considerable difficulty
in following the rapid flight of events
when they occur in unfamiliar surroundings.
The child grasps very little in seeing the happenings
in a factory. The psychological and
economic lesson may be rather wasted because
the power of observation is not sufficiently
developed and the assimilation proceeds too
slowly. But it is quite different when a
human interest stands behind it and connects
the events in the photoplay.
The difficulties in the way of the right
moral influence are still greater than in the
intellectual field. Certainly it is not enough
to have the villain punished in the last few
pictures of the reel. If scenes of vice or
crime are shown with all their lure and glamour
the moral devastation of such a suggestive
show is not undone by the appended social
reaction. The misguided boys or girls feel
sure that they would be successful enough
not to be trapped. The mind through a mechanism
which has been understood better and
better by the psychologists in recent years
suppresses the ideas which are contrary to
the secret wishes and makes those ideas
flourish by which those "subconscious" impulses
are fulfilled. It is probably a strong
exaggeration when a prominent criminologist
recently claimed that "eighty-five per cent.
of the juvenile crime which has been investigated
has been found traceable either directly
or indirectly to motion pictures which
have shown on the screen how crimes could
be committed." But certainly, as far as these
demonstrations have worked havoc, their influence
would not have been annihilated by a
picturesque court scene in which the burglar
is unsuccessful in misleading the jury. The
true moral influence must come from the positive
spirit of the play itself. Even the photodramatic
lessons in temperance and piety will
not rebuild a frivolous or corrupt or perverse
community. The truly upbuilding play is not
a dramatized sermon on morality and religion.
There must be a moral wholesomeness
in the whole setting, a moral atmosphere
which is taken as a matter of course like fresh
air and sunlight. An enthusiasm for the noble
and uplifting, a belief in duty and discipline
of the mind, a faith in ideals and eternal
values must permeate the world of the screen.
If it does, there is no crime and no heinous
deed which the photoplay may not tell with
frankness and sincerity. It is not necessary
to deny evil and sin in order to strengthen the
consciousness of eternal justice.
But the greatest mission which the photoplay
may have in our community is that of
esthetic cultivation. No art reaches a
larger audience daily, no esthetic influence
finds spectators in a more receptive
frame of mind. On the other hand no training
demands a more persistent and planful
arousing of the mind than the esthetic training,
and never is progress more difficult
than when the teacher adjusts himself to the
mere liking of the pupils. The country today
would still be without any symphony concerts
and operas if it had only received what the
audiences believed at the moment that they
liked best. The esthetically commonplace
will always triumph over the significant unless
systematic efforts are made to reënforce
the work of true beauty. Communities at first
always prefer Sousa to Beethoven. The moving
picture audience could only by slow steps
be brought from the tasteless and vulgar
eccentricities of the first period to the best
plays of today, and the best plays of today
can be nothing but the beginning of the great
upward movement which we hope for in the
photoplay. Hardly any teaching can mean
more for our community than the teaching of
beauty where it reaches the masses. The
moral impulse and the desire for knowledge
are, after all, deeply implanted in the American
crowd, but the longing for beauty is rudimentary;
and yet it means harmony, unity,
true satisfaction, and happiness in life. The
people still has to learn the great difference
between true enjoyment and fleeting pleasure,
between real beauty and the mere tickling of
the senses.
Of course, there are those, and they may
be legion today, who would deride every plan
to make the moving pictures the vehicle of
esthetic education. How can we teach the
spirit of true art by a medium which is in
itself the opposite of art? How can we implant
the idea of harmony by that which is in
itself a parody on art? We hear the contempt
for "canned drama" and the machine-made
theater. Nobody stops to think whether
other arts despise the help of technique. The
printed book of lyric poems is also machine-made;
the marble bust has also "preserved"
for two thousand years the beauty of the living
woman who was the model for the Greek
sculptor. They tell us that the actor on the
stage gives the human beings as they are in
reality, but the moving pictures are unreal
and therefore of incomparably inferior value.
They do not consider that the roses of the
summer which we enjoy in the stanzas of the
poet do not exist in reality in the forms of
iambic verse and of rhymes; they live in color
and odor, but their color and odor fade away,
while the roses in the stanzas live on forever.
They fancy that the value of an art depends
upon its nearness to the reality of physical
nature.
It has been the chief task of our whole discussion
to prove the shallowness of such
arguments and objections. We recognized
that art is a way to overcome nature and to
create out of the chaotic material of the world
something entirely new, entirely unreal, which
embodies perfect unity and harmony. The
different arts are different ways of abstracting
from reality; and when we began
to analyze the psychology of the moving pictures
we soon became aware that the photoplay
has a way to perform this task of art
with entire originality, independent of the art
of the theater, as much as poetry is independent
of music or sculpture of painting. It is
an art in itself. Only the future can teach us
whether it will become a great art, whether
a Leonardo, a Shakespeare, a Mozart, will
ever be born for it. Nobody can foresee the
directions which the new art may take. Mere
esthetic insight into the principles can never
foreshadow the development in the unfolding
of civilization. Who would have been bold
enough four centuries ago to foresee the
musical means and effects of the modern
orchestra? Just the history of music shows
how the inventive genius has always had to
blaze the path in which the routine work of
the art followed. Tone combinations which
appeared intolerable dissonances to one generation
were again and again assimilated and
welcomed and finally accepted as a matter of
course by later times. Nobody can foresee
the ways which the new art of the photoplay
will open, but everybody ought to recognize
even today that it is worth while to help this
advance and to make the art of the film a
medium for an original creative expression of
our time and to mold by it the esthetic instincts
of the millions. Yes, it is a new art—and
this is why it has such fascination for
the psychologist who in a world of ready-made
arts, each with a history of many centuries,
suddenly finds a new form still undeveloped
and hardly understood. For the first
time the psychologist can observe the starting
of an entirely new esthetic development, a
new form of true beauty in the turmoil of a
technical age, created by its very technique
and yet more than any other art destined to
overcome outer nature by the free and joyful
play of the mind.
BOOKS BY HUGO MÜNSTERBERG
- Psychology and Life
pp. 286, Boston, 1899
- Grundzüge der Psychologie
pp. 565, Leipzig, 1900
- American Traits
pp. 235, Boston, 1902
- Die Amerikaner
pp. 502 and 349, Berlin, 1904 (Rev, 1912)
- Principles of Art Education
pp. 118, New York, 1905
- The Eternal Life
pp. 72, Boston, 1905
- Science and Idealism
pp. 71, Boston, 1906
- Philosophie der Werte
pp. 486, Leipzig, 1907
- On the Witness Stand
pp. 269, New York, 1908
- Aus Deutsch-Amerika
pp. 245, Berlin, 1909
- The Eternal Values
pp. 436, Boston, 1909
- Psychotherapy
pp. 401, New York, 1909
- Psychology and the Teacher
pp. 330, New York, 1910
- American Problems
pp. 222, New York, 1910
- Psychologie und Wirtschaftsleben
pp. 192, Leipzig, 1912
- Vocation and Learning
pp. 289, St. Louis, 1912
- Psychology and Industrial Efficiency
pp. 321, Boston, 1913
- American Patriotism
pp. 262, New York, 1913
- Grundzüge der Psychotechnik
pp. 767, Leipzig, 1914
- Psychology and Social Sanity
pp. 320, New York, 1914
- Psychology, General and Applied
pp. 488, New York, 1914
- The War and America
pp. 210, New York, 1914
- The Peace and America
pp. 276, New York, 1915
- The Photoplay
New York, 1916
