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Page 35
But the photoplay sacrifices not only the space values of the real
theater; it disregards no less its order of time. The theater presents
its plot in the time order of reality. It may interrupt the continuous
flow of time without neglecting the conditions of the dramatic art.
There may be twenty years between the third and the fourth act, inasmuch
as the dramatic writer must select those elements spread over space and
time which are significant for the development of his story. But he is
bound by the fundamental principle of real time, that it can move only
forward and not backward. Whatever the theater shows us now must come
later in the story than that which it showed us in any previous moment.
The strict classical demand for complete unity of time does not fit
every drama, but a drama would give up its mission if it told us in the
third act something which happened before the second act. Of course,
there may be a play within a play, and the players on the stage which is
set on the stage may play events of old Roman history before the king
of France. But this is an enclosure of the past in the present, which
corresponds exactly to the actual order of events. The photoplay, on the
other hand, does not and must not respect this temporal structure of the
physical universe. At any point the photoplay interrupts the series and
brings us back to the past. We studied this unique feature of the film
art when we spoke of the psychology of memory and imagination. With the
full freedom of our fancy, with the whole mobility of our association of
ideas, pictures of the past flit through the scenes of the present. Time
is left behind. Man becomes boy; today is interwoven with the day before
yesterday. The freedom of the mind has triumphed over the unalterable
law of the outer world.
It is interesting to watch how playwrights nowadays try to steal the
thunder of the photoplay and experiment with time reversals on the
legitimate stage. We are esthetically on the borderland when a
grandfather tells his grandchild the story of his own youth as a
warning, and instead of the spoken words the events of his early years
come before our eyes. This is, after all, quite similar to a play
within a play. A very different experiment is tried in "Under Cover."
The third act, which plays on the second floor of the house, ends with
an explosion. The fourth act, which plays downstairs, begins a quarter
of an hour before the explosion. Here we have a real denial of a
fundamental condition of the theater. Or if we stick to recent products
of the American stage, we may think of "On Trial," a play which perhaps
comes nearest to a dramatic usurpation of the rights of the photoplay.
We see the court scene and as one witness after another begins to give
his testimony the courtroom is replaced by the scenes of the actions
about which the witness is to report. Another clever play, "Between the
Lines," ends the first act with a postman bringing three letters from
the three children of the house. The second, third, and fourth acts lead
us to the three different homes from which the letters came and the
action in the three places not only precedes the writing of the letters;
but goes on at the same time. The last act, finally, begins with the
arrival of the letters which tell the ending of those events in the
three homes. Such experiments are very suggestive but they are not any
longer pure dramatic art. It is always possible to mix arts. An Italian
painter produces very striking effects by putting pieces of glass and
stone and rope into his paintings, but they are no longer pure
paintings. The drama in which the later event comes before the earlier
is an esthetic barbarism which is entertaining as a clever trick in a
graceful superficial play, but intolerable in ambitious dramatic art. It
is not only tolerable but perfectly natural in any photoplay. The
pictorial reflection of the world is not bound by the rigid mechanism of
time. Our mind is here and there, our mind turns to the present and then
to the past: the photoplay can equal it in its freedom from the bondage
of the material world.
But the theater is bound not only by space and time. Whatever it shows
is controlled by the same laws of causality which govern nature. This
involves a complete continuity of the physical events: no cause without
following effect, no effect without preceding cause. This whole natural
course is left behind in the play on the screen. The deviation from
reality begins with that resolution of the continuous movement which we
studied in our psychological discussions. We saw that the impression of
movement results from an activity of the mind which binds the separate
pictures together. What we actually see is a composite; it is like the
movement of a fountain in which every jet is resolved into numberless
drops. We feel the play of those drops in their sparkling haste as one
continuous stream of water, and yet are conscious of the myriads of
drops, each one separate from the others. This fountainlike spray of
pictures has completely overcome the causal world.
In an entirely different form this triumph over causality appears in the
interruption of the events by pictures which belong to another series.
We find this whenever the scene suddenly changes. The processes are not
carried to their natural consequences. A movement is started, but before
the cause brings its results another scene has taken its place. What
this new scene brings may be an effect for which we saw no causes. But
not only the processes are interrupted. The intertwining of the scenes
which we have traced in detail is itself such a contrast to causality.
It is as if different objects could fill the same space at the same
time. It is as if the resistance of the material world had disappeared
and the substances could penetrate one another. In the interlacing of
our ideas we experience this superiority to all physical laws. The
theater would not have even the technical means to give us such
impressions, but if it had, it would have no right to make use of them,
as it would destroy the basis on which the drama is built. We have only
another case of the same type in those series of pictures which aim to
force a suggestion on our mind. We have spoken of them. A certain effect
is prepared by a chain of causes and yet when the causal result is to
appear the film is cut off. We have the causes without the effect. The
villain thrusts with his dagger--but a miracle has snatched away his
victim.
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