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Page 42
Above all, even those who are drawn by the cheapness of the performance
would hardly push their dimes under the little window so often if they
did not really enjoy the plays and were not stirred by a pleasure which
holds them for hours. After all, it must be the content of the
performances which is decisive of the incomparable triumph. We have no
right to conclude from this that only the merits and excellences are the
true causes of their success. A caustic critic would probably suggest
that just the opposite traits are responsible. He would say that the
average American is a mixture of business, ragtime, and sentimentality.
He satisfies his business instinct by getting so much for his nickel, he
enjoys his ragtime in the slapstick humor, and gratifies his
sentimentality with the preposterous melodramas which fill the program.
This is quite true, and yet it is not true at all. Success has crowned
every effort to improve the photostage; the better the plays are the
more the audience approves them. The most ambitious companies are the
most flourishing ones. There must be inner values which make the
photoplay so extremely attractive and even fascinating.
To a certain degree the mere technical cleverness of the pictures even
today holds the interest spellbound as in those early days when nothing
but this technical skill could claim the attention. We are still
startled by every original effect, even if the mere showing of movement
has today lost its impressiveness. Moreover we are captivated by the
undeniable beauty of many settings. The melodrama may be cheap; yet it
does not disturb the cultured mind as grossly as a similar tragic
vulgarity would on the real stage, because it may have the snowfields of
Alaska or the palm trees of Florida as radiant background. An
intellectual interest, too, finds its satisfaction. We get an insight
into spheres which were strange to us. Where outlying regions of human
interest are shown on the theater stage, we must usually be satisfied
with some standardized suggestion. Here in the moving pictures the play
may really bring us to mills and factories, to farms and mines, to
courtrooms and hospitals, to castles and palaces in any land on earth.
Yet a stronger power of the photoplay probably lies in its own dramatic
qualities. The rhythm of the play is marked by unnatural rapidity. As
the words are absent which, in the drama as in life, fill the gaps
between the actions, the gestures and deeds themselves can follow one
another much more quickly. Happenings which would fill an hour on the
stage can hardly fill more than twenty minutes on the screen. This
heightens the feeling of vitality in the spectator. He feels as if he
were passing through life with a sharper accent which stirs his personal
energies. The usual make-up of the photoplay must strengthen this effect
inasmuch as the wordlessness of the picture drama favors a certain
simplification of the social conflicts. The subtler shades of the
motives naturally demand speech. The later plays of Ibsen could hardly
be transformed into photoplays. Where words are missing the characters
tend to become stereotyped and the motives to be deprived of their
complexity. The plot of the photoplay is usually based on the
fundamental emotions which are common to all and which are understood
by everybody. Love and hate, gratitude and envy, hope and fear, pity and
jealousy, repentance and sinfulness, and all the similar crude emotions
have been sufficient for the construction of most scenarios. The more
mature development of the photoplay will certainly overcome this
primitive character, as, while such an effort to reduce human life to
simple instincts is very convenient for the photoplay, it is not at all
necessary. In any case where this tendency prevails it must help greatly
to excite and to intensify the personal feeling of life and to stir the
depths of the human mind.
But the richest source of the unique satisfaction in the photoplay is
probably that esthetic feeling which is significant for the new art and
which we have understood from its psychological conditions. _The massive
outer world has lost its weight, it has been freed from space, time, and
causality, and it has been clothed in the forms of our own
consciousness. The mind has triumphed over matter and the pictures roll
on with the ease of musical tones. It is a superb enjoyment which no
other art can furnish us._ No wonder that temples for the new goddess
are built in every little hamlet.
The intensity with which the plays take hold of the audience cannot
remain without strong social effects. It has even been reported that
sensory hallucinations and illusions have crept in; neurasthenic persons
are especially inclined to experience touch or temperature or smell or
sound impressions from what they see on the screen. The associations
become as vivid as realities, because the mind is so completely given up
to the moving pictures. The applause into which the audiences,
especially of rural communities, break out at a happy turn of the
melodramatic pictures is another symptom of the strange fascination. But
it is evident that such a penetrating influence must be fraught with
dangers. The more vividly the impressions force themselves on the mind,
the more easily must they become starting points for imitation and other
motor responses. The sight of crime and of vice may force itself on the
consciousness with disastrous results. The normal resistance breaks down
and the moral balance, which would have been kept under the habitual
stimuli of the narrow routine life, may be lost under the pressure of
the realistic suggestions. At the same time the subtle sensitiveness of
the young mind may suffer from the rude contrasts between the farces and
the passionate romances which follow with benumbing speed in the
darkened house. The possibilities of psychical infection and destruction
cannot be overlooked.
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