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Page 21
There is no limit to the number of threads which may be interwoven. A
complex intrigue may demand co�peration 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.
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