He alone can change the background and all the surroundings
of the acting person from instant to instant. He is not bound to one
setting, he has no technical difficulty in altering the whole scene with
every smile and every frown. To be sure, the theater can give us
changing sunshine and thunderclouds too. But it must go on at the slow
pace and with the clumsiness with which the events in nature pass. The
photoplay can flit from one to the other. Not more than one sixteenth of
a second is needed to carry us from one corner of the globe to the
other, from a jubilant setting to a mourning scene. The whole keyboard
of the imagination may be used to serve this emotionalizing of nature.
There is a girl in her little room, and she opens a letter and reads it.
There is no need of showing us in a close-up the letter page with the
male handwriting and the words of love and the request for her hand. We
see it in her radiant visage, we read it from her fascinated arms and
hands; and yet how much more can the photoartist tell us about the storm
of emotions in her soul. The walls of her little room fade away.
Beautiful hedges of hawthorn blossom around her, rose bushes in
wonderful glory arise and the whole ground is alive with exotic flowers.
Or the young artist sits in his attic playing his violin; we see the bow
moving over the strings but the dreamy face of the player does not
change with his music.
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