PART I

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE PHOTOPLAY

CHAPTER III[1]

DEPTH AND MOVEMENT

[1] Readers who have no technical interest in physiological
    psychology may omit Chapter III and turn directly to Chapter IV on
    Attention.

The problem is now quite clear before us.  Do the photoplays furnish us only a photographic reproduction of a stage performance; is their aim thus simply to be an inexpensive substitute for the real theater, and is their esthetic standing accordingly far below that of the true dramatic art, related to it as the photograph of a painting to the original canvas of the master?  Or do the moving pictures bring us an independent art, controlled by esthetic laws of its own, working with mental appeals which are fundamentally different from those of the theater, with a sphere of its own and with ideal aims of its own?  If this so far neglected problem is ours, we evidently need not ask in our further discussions about all which books on moving pictures have so far put into the foreground, namely the physical technique of producing the pictures on the film or of projecting the pictures on the screen, or anything else which belongs to the technical or physical or economic aspect of the photoplay industry.  Moreover it is then evidently not our concern to deal with those moving pictures which serve mere curiosity or the higher desires for information and instruction.  Those educational pictures may give us delight, and certainly much esthetic enjoyment may be combined with the intellectual satisfaction, when the wonders of distant lands are unveiled to us.  The landscape setting of such a travel film may be a thing of beauty, but the pictures are not taken for art’s sake.  The aim is to serve the spread of knowledge.

Our esthetic interest turns to the means by which the photoplay influences the mind of the spectator.  If we try to understand and to explain the means by which music exerts its powerful effects, we do not reach our goal by describing the structure of the piano and of the violin, or by explaining the physical laws of sound.  We must proceed to the psychology and ask for the mental processes of the hearing of tones and of chords, of harmonies and disharmonies, of tone qualities and tone intensities, of rhythms and phrases, and must trace how these elements are combined in the melodies and compositions.  In this way we turn to the photoplay, at first with a purely psychological interest, and ask for the elementary excitements of the mind which enter into our experience of the moving pictures.  We now disregard entirely the idea of the theater performance.  We should block our way if we were to start from the theater and were to ask how much is left out in the mere photographic substitute.  We approach the art of the film theater as if it stood entirely on its own ground, and extinguish all memory of the world of actors.  We analyze the mental processes which this specific form of artistic endeavor produces in us.