There are still rich
possibilities along this line. The photoplay has hardly come to its own
with regard to these secondary emotions. Here it has not emancipated
itself sufficiently from the model of the stage. Those emotions arise,
of course, in the audience of a theater too, but the dramatic stage
cannot embody them. In the opera the orchestra may symbolize them. For
the photoplay, which is not bound to the physical succession of events
but gives us only the pictorial reflection, there is an unlimited field
for the expression of these attitudes in ourselves.
But the wide expansion of this field and of the whole manifoldness of
emotional possibilities in the moving pictures is not sufficiently
characterized as long as we think only of the optical representation in
the actual outer world. The camera men of the moving pictures have
photographed the happenings of the world and all its wonders, have gone
to the bottom of the sea and up to the clouds; they have surprised the
beasts in the jungles and in the Arctic ice; they have dwelt with the
lowest races and have captured the greatest men of our time: and they
are always haunted by the fear that the supply of new sensations may be
exhausted. Curiously enough, they have so far ignored the fact that an
inexhaustible wealth of new impressions is at their disposal, which has
hardly been touched as yet.
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