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Page 10
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.
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