Of course, the substitute could not be equal to the original.  The color was lacking, the real depth of the objective stage was missing, and above all the spoken word had been silenced.  The few interspersed descriptive texts, the so-called “leaders,” had to hint at that which in the real drama the speeches of the actors explain and elaborate.  It was thus surely only the shadow of a true theater, different not only as a photograph is compared with a painting, but different as a photograph is compared with the original man.  And yet, however meager and shadowlike the moving picture play appeared compared with the performance of living actors, the advantage of the cheap multiplication was so great that the ambition of the producers was natural, to go forward from the little playlets to great dramas which held the attention for hours.  The kinematographic theater soon had its Shakespeare repertoire; Ibsen has been played and the dramatized novels on the screen became legion.  Victor Hugo and Dickens scored new triumphs.  In a few years the way from the silly trite practical joke to Hamlet and Peer Gynt was covered with such thoroughness that the possibility of giving a photographic rendering of any thinkable theater performance was proven for all time.

But while this movement to reproduce stage performances went on, elements were superadded which the technique of the camera allowed but which would hardly be possible in a theater.  Hence the development led slowly to a certain deviation from the path of the drama.  The difference which strikes the observer first results from the chance of the camera man to set his scene in the real backgrounds of nature and culture.  The stage manager of the theater can paint the ocean and, if need be, can move some colored cloth to look like rolling waves; and yet how far is his effect surpassed by the superb ocean pictures when the scene is played on the real cliffs and the waves are thundering at their foot and the surf is foaming about the actors.  The theater has its painted villages and vistas, its city streets and its foreign landscape backgrounds.  But here the theater, in spite of the reality of the actors, appears thoroughly unreal compared with the throbbing life of the street scenes and of the foreign crowds in which the camera man finds his local color.

But still more characteristic is the rapidity with which the whole background can be changed in the moving pictures.  Reinhardt’s revolving stage had brought wonderful surprises to the theater-goer and had shifted the scene with a quickness which was unknown before.  Yet how slow and clumsy does it remain compared with the routine changes of the photoplays.  This changing of background is so easy for the camera that at a very early date this new feature of the plays was introduced.  At first it served mostly humorous purposes.  The public of the crude early shows enjoyed the flashlike quickness with which it could follow the eloper over the roofs of the town,