It is not necessary to enumerate still more changes which the development of the art of the film has brought since the days of the kinetoscope.  The use of natural backgrounds, the rapid change of scenes, the intertwining of the actions in different scenes, the changes of the rhythms of action, the passing through physically impossible experiences, the linking of disconnected movements, the realization of supernatural effects, the gigantic enlargement of small details:  these may be sufficient as characteristic illustrations of the essential trend.  They show that the progress of the photoplay did not lead to a more and more perfect photographic reproduction of the theater stage, but led away from the theater altogether.  Superficial impressions suggest the opposite and still leave the esthetically careless observer in the belief that the photoplay is a cheap substitute for the real drama, a theater performance as good or as bad as a photographic reproduction allows.  But this traditional idea has become utterly untrue. The art of the photoplay has developed so many new features of its own, features which have not even any similarity to the technique of the stage that the question arises:  is it not really a new art which long since left behind the mere film reproduction of the theater and which ought to be acknowledged in its own esthetic independence? This right to independent recognition has so far been ignored.  Practically everybody who judged the photoplays from the esthetic point of view remained at the old comparison between the film and the graphophone.  The photoplay is still something which simply imitates the true art of the drama on the stage.  May it not be, on the contrary, that it does not imitate or replace anything, but is in itself an art as different from that of the theater as the painter’s art is different from that of the sculptor?  And may it not be high time, in the interest of theory and of practice, to examine the esthetic conditions which would give independent rights to the new art?  If this is really the situation, it must be a truly fascinating problem, as it would give the chance to watch the art in its first unfolding.  A new esthetic cocoon is broken; where will the butterfly’s wings carry him?

We have at last reached the real problem of this little book.  We want to study the right of the photoplay, hitherto ignored by esthetics, to be classed as an art in itself under entirely new mental life conditions.  What we need for this study is evidently, first, an insight into the means by which the moving pictures impress us and appeal to us.  Not the physical means and technical devices are in question, but the mental means.  What psychological factors are involved when we watch the happenings on the screen?  But secondly, we must ask what characterizes the independence of an art, what constitutes the conditions under which the works of a special art stand.  The first inquiry is psychological, the second esthetic; the two belong intimately together.  Hence we turn first to the psychological aspect of the moving pictures and later to the artistic one.