At
first it served mostly humorous purposes. The public of the crude early
shows enjoyed the flashlike quickness with which it could follow the
eloper over the roofs of the town, upstairs and down, into cellar and
attic, and jump into the auto and race over the country roads until the
culprit fell over a bridge into the water and was caught by the police.
This slapstick humor has by no means disappeared, but the rapid change
of scenes has meanwhile been put into the service of much higher aims.
The development of an artistic plot has been brought to possibilities
which the real drama does not know, by allowing the eye to follow the
hero and heroine continuously from place to place. Now he leaves his
room, now we see him passing along the street, now he enters the house
of his beloved, now he is led into the parlor, now she is hurrying to
the library of her father, now they all go to the garden: ever new
stage settings sliding into one another. Technical difficulties do not
stand in the way. A set of pictures taken by the camera man a thousand
miles away can be inserted for a few feet in the film, and the audience
sees now the clubroom in New York, and now the snows of Alaska and now
the tropics, near each other in the same reel.
Moreover the ease with which the scenes are altered allows us not only
to hurry on to ever new spots, but to be at the same time in two or
three places.
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