The
theater would not have even the technical means to give us such
impressions, but if it had, it would have no right to make use of them,
as it would destroy the basis on which the drama is built. We have only
another case of the same type in those series of pictures which aim to
force a suggestion on our mind. We have spoken of them. A certain effect
is prepared by a chain of causes and yet when the causal result is to
appear the film is cut off. We have the causes without the effect. The
villain thrusts with his dagger--but a miracle has snatched away his
victim.
_While the moving pictures are lifted above the world of space and time
and causality and are freed from its bounds, they are certainly not
without law._ We said before that the freedom with which the pictures
replace one another is to a large degree comparable to the sparkling
and streaming of the musical tones. The yielding to the play of the
mental energies, to the attention and emotion, which is felt in the film
pictures, is still more complete in the musical melodies and harmonies
in which the tones themselves are merely the expressions of the ideas
and feelings and will impulses of the mind. Their harmonies and
disharmonies, their fusing and blending, is not controlled by any outer
necessity, but by the inner agreement and disagreement of our free
impulses.
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