If we had seen the young sailor in his hammock on the theater
stage, he might have hinted to us whatever passed through his mind by a
kind of monologue or by some enthusiastic speech to a friend. But then
we should have seen before our inner eye only that which the names of
foreign places awake in ourselves. We should not really have seen the
wonders of the world through the eyes of his soul and with the glow of
his hope. The drama would have given dead names to our ear; the
photoplay gives ravishing scenery to our eye and shows the fancy of the
young fellow in the scene really living.
From here we see the perspective to the fantastic dreams which the
camera can fixate. Whenever the theater introduces an imagined setting
and the stage clouds sink over the sleeper and the angels fill the
stage, the beauty of the verses must excuse the shortcomings of the
visual appeal. The photoplay artist can gain his triumphs here. Even the
vulgar effects become softened by this setting. The ragged tramp who
climbs a tree and falls asleep in the shady branches and then lives
through a reversed world in which he and his kind feast and glory and
live in palaces and sail in yachts, and, when the boiler of the yacht
explodes, falls from the tree to the ground, becomes a tolerable
spectacle because all is merged in the unreal pictures.
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