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Page 8
We have at last reached the real problem of this little book. We want to
study the right of the photoplay, hitherto ignored by esthetics, to be
classed as an art in itself under entirely new mental life conditions.
What we need for this study is evidently, first, an insight into the
means by which the moving pictures impress us and appeal to us. Not the
physical means and technical devices are in question, but the mental
means. What psychological factors are involved when we watch the
happenings on the screen? But secondly, we must ask what characterizes
the independence of an art, what constitutes the conditions under which
the works of a special art stand. The first inquiry is psychological,
the second esthetic; the two belong intimately together. Hence we turn
first to the psychological aspect of the moving pictures and later to
the artistic one.
PART I
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE PHOTOPLAY
CHAPTER III[1]
DEPTH AND MOVEMENT
[1] Readers who have no technical interest in physiological
psychology may omit Chapter III and turn directly to Chapter IV on
Attention.
The problem is now quite clear before us. Do the photoplays furnish us
only a photographic reproduction of a stage performance; is their aim
thus simply to be an inexpensive substitute for the real theater, and is
their esthetic standing accordingly far below that of the true dramatic
art, related to it as the photograph of a painting to the original
canvas of the master? Or do the moving pictures bring us an independent
art, controlled by esthetic laws of its own, working with mental appeals
which are fundamentally different from those of the theater, with a
sphere of its own and with ideal aims of its own? If this so far
neglected problem is ours, we evidently need not ask in our further
discussions about all which books on moving pictures have so far put
into the foreground, namely the physical technique of producing the
pictures on the film or of projecting the pictures on the screen, or
anything else which belongs to the technical or physical or economic
aspect of the photoplay industry. Moreover it is then evidently not our
concern to deal with those moving pictures which serve mere curiosity or
the higher desires for information and instruction. Those educational
pictures may give us delight, and certainly much esthetic enjoyment may
be combined with the intellectual satisfaction, when the wonders of
distant lands are unveiled to us. The landscape setting of such a travel
film may be a thing of beauty, but the pictures are not taken for art's
sake. The aim is to serve the spread of knowledge.
Our esthetic interest turns to the means by which the photoplay
influences the mind of the spectator. If we try to understand and to
explain the means by which music exerts its powerful effects, we do not
reach our goal by describing the structure of the piano and of the
violin, or by explaining the physical laws of sound. We must proceed to
the psychology and ask for the mental processes of the hearing of tones
and of chords, of harmonies and disharmonies, of tone qualities and tone
intensities, of rhythms and phrases, and must trace how these elements
are combined in the melodies and compositions. In this way we turn to
the photoplay, at first with a purely psychological interest, and ask
for the elementary excitements of the mind which enter into our
experience of the moving pictures. We now disregard entirely the idea of
the theater performance. We should block our way if we were to start
from the theater and were to ask how much is left out in the mere
photographic substitute. We approach the art of the film theater as if
it stood entirely on its own ground, and extinguish all memory of the
world of actors. We analyze the mental processes which this specific
form of artistic endeavor produces in us.
To begin at the beginning, the photoplay consists of a series of flat
pictures in contrast to the plastic objects of the real world which
surrounds us. But we may stop at once: what does it mean to say that the
surroundings appear to the mind plastic and the moving pictures flat?
The psychology of this difference is easily misunderstood. Of course,
when we are sitting in the picture palace we know that we see a flat
screen and that the object which we see has only two dimensions,
right-left, and up-down, but not the third dimension of depth, of
distance toward us or away from us. It is flat like a picture and never
plastic like a work of sculpture or architecture or like a stage. Yet
this is knowledge and not immediate impression. We have no right
whatever to say that the scenes which we see on the screen appear to us
as flat pictures.
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