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Page 20
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.
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