Memory looks toward the past, expectation and imagination toward the future.  But in the midst of the perception of our surroundings our mind turns not only to that which has happened before and which may happen later; it is interested in happenings at the same time in other places.  The theater can show us only the events at one spot.  Our mind craves more.  Life does not move forward on one single pathway.  The whole manifoldness of parallel currents with their endless interconnections is the true substance of our understanding.  It may be the task of a particular art to force all into one steady development between the walls of one room, but every letter and every telephone call to the room remind us even then that other developments with other settings are proceeding in the same instant.  The soul longs for this whole interplay, and the richer it is in contrasts, the more satisfaction may be drawn from our simultaneous presence in many quarters.  The photoplay alone gives us our chance for such omnipresence.  We see the banker, who had told his young wife that he has a directors’ meeting, at a late hour in a cabaret feasting with a stenographer from his office.  She had promised her poor old parents to be home early.  We see the gorgeous roof garden and the tango dances, but our dramatic interest is divided among the frivolous pair, the jealous young woman in the suburban cottage, and the anxious old people in the attic.  Our mind wavers among the three scenes.  The photoplay shows one after another.  Yet it can hardly be said that we think of them as successive.  It is as if we were really at all three places at once.  We see the joyous dance which is of central dramatic interest for twenty seconds, then for three seconds the wife in her luxurious boudoir looking at the dial of the clock, for three seconds again the grieved parents eagerly listening for any sound on the stairs, and anew for twenty seconds the turbulent festival.  The frenzy reaches a climax, and in that moment we are suddenly again with his unhappy wife; it is only a flash, and the next instant we see the tears of the girl’s poor mother.  The three scenes proceed almost as if no one were interrupted at all.  It is as if we saw one through another, as if three tones blended into one chord.

There is no limit to the number of threads which may be interwoven.  A complex intrigue may demand cooeperation at half a dozen spots, and we look now into one, now into another, and never have the impression that they come one after another.  The temporal element has disappeared, the one action irradiates in all directions.  Of course, this can easily be exaggerated, and the result must be a certain restlessness.  If the scene changes too often and no movement is carried on without a break, the play may irritate us by its nervous jerking from place to place.  Near the end of the Theda Bara edition of Carmen the scene changes one hundred and seventy times in ten minutes, an average of a little more than three seconds for each scene.  We follow Don Jose and Carmen and the toreador in ever new phases of the dramatic action and are constantly carried back to Don Jose’s home village where his mother waits for him.  There indeed the dramatic tension has an element of nervousness, in contrast to the Geraldine Farrar version of Carmen which allows a more unbroken development of the single action.