The analysis of the mind of the audience must lead, however, to that
second group of emotions, those in which the spectator responds to the
scenes on the film from the standpoint of his independent affective
life. We see an overbearing pompous person who is filled with the
emotion of solemnity, and yet he awakens in us the emotion of humor. We
answer by our ridicule. We see the scoundrel who in the melodramatic
photoplay is filled with fiendish malice, and yet we do not respond by
imitating his emotion; we feel moral indignation toward his personality.
We see the laughing, rejoicing child who, while he picks the berries
from the edge of the precipice, is not aware that he must fall down if
the hero does not snatch him back at the last moment. Of course, we feel
the child's joy with him. Otherwise we should not even understand his
behaviour, but we feel more strongly the fear and the horror of which
the child himself does not know anything. The photoplaywrights have so
far hardly ventured to project this second class of emotion, which the
spectator superadds to the events, into the show on the screen. Only
tentative suggestions can be found. The enthusiasm or the disapproval
or indignation of the spectator is sometimes released in the lights and
shades and in the setting of the landscape.
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