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Page 11
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 zo�trope and bioscope.
The child who made his zo�trope 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 zo�trope
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 zo�trope, 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 zo�trope 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.
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