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Page 24
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.
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