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.
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