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.
We may become more strongly conscious of this difference between an
object of our knowledge and an object of our impression, if we remember
a well-known instrument, the stereoscope.
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