But he is
bound by the fundamental principle of real time, that it can move only
forward and not backward. Whatever the theater shows us now must come
later in the story than that which it showed us in any previous moment.
The strict classical demand for complete unity of time does not fit
every drama, but a drama would give up its mission if it told us in the
third act something which happened before the second act. Of course,
there may be a play within a play, and the players on the stage which is
set on the stage may play events of old Roman history before the king
of France. But this is an enclosure of the past in the present, which
corresponds exactly to the actual order of events. The photoplay, on the
other hand, does not and must not respect this temporal structure of the
physical universe. At any point the photoplay interrupts the series and
brings us back to the past. We studied this unique feature of the film
art when we spoke of the psychology of memory and imagination. With the
full freedom of our fancy, with the whole mobility of our association of
ideas, pictures of the past flit through the scenes of the present. Time
is left behind. Man becomes boy; today is interwoven with the day before
yesterday. The freedom of the mind has triumphed over the unalterable
law of the outer world.
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