Not the portrait of the
man but the picture as a whole has to be filled with emotional
exuberance.
Everything so far has referred to the emotions of the persons in the
play, but this cannot be sufficient. When we were interested in
attention and memory we did not ask about the act of attention and
memory in the persons of the play, but in the spectator, and we
recognized that these mental activities and excitements in the audience
were projected into the moving pictures. Just here was the center of
our interest, because it showed that uniqueness of the means with which
the photoplaywright can work. If we want to shape the question now in
the same way, we ought to ask how it is with the emotions of the
spectator. But then two different groups of cases must be distinguished.
On the one side we have those emotions in which the feelings of the
persons in the play are transmitted to our own soul. On the other side,
we find those feelings with which we respond to the scenes in the play,
feelings which may be entirely different, perhaps exactly opposite to
those which the figures in the play express.
The first group is by far the larger one. Our imitation of the emotions
which we see expressed brings vividness and affective tone into our
grasping of the play's action. We sympathize with the sufferer and that
means that the pain which he expresses becomes our own pain.
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