from that mining camp and who has at least the prizefighter’s cauliflower ear which results from the smashing of the ear cartilage.  If he needs the fat bartender with his smug smile, or the humble Jewish peddler, or the Italian organ grinder, he does not rely on wigs and paint; he finds them all ready-made on the East Side.  With the right body and countenance the emotion is distinctly more credible.  The emotional expression in the photoplays is therefore often more natural in the small roles which the outsiders play than in the chief parts of the professionals who feel that they must outdo nature.

But our whole consideration so far has been onesided and narrow.  We have asked only about the means by which the photoactor expresses his emotion, and we were naturally confined to the analysis of his bodily reactions.  But while the human individual in our surroundings has hardly any other means than the bodily expressions to show his emotions and moods, the photoplaywright is certainly not bound by these limits.  Yet even in life the emotional tone may radiate beyond the body.  A person expresses his mourning by his black clothes and his joy by gay attire, or he may make the piano or violin ring forth in happiness or moan in sadness.  Even his whole room or house may be penetrated by his spirit of welcoming cordiality or his emotional setting of forbidding harshness.  The feeling of the soul emanates into the surroundings and the impression which we get of our neighbor’s emotional attitude may be derived from this external frame of the personality as much as from the gestures and the face.

This effect of the surrounding surely can and must be much heightened in the artistic theater play.  All the stage settings of the scene ought to be in harmony with the fundamental emotions of the play, and many an act owes its success to the unity of emotional impression which results from the perfect painting of the background; it reverberates to the passions of the mind.  From the highest artistic color and form effects of the stage in the Reinhardt style down to the cheapest melodrama with soft blue lights and tender music for the closing scene, the stage arrangements tell the story of the intimate emotion.  But just this additional expression of the feeling through the medium of the surrounding scene, through background and setting, through lines and forms and movements, is very much more at the disposal of the photoartist.  He alone can change the background and all the surroundings of the acting person from instant to instant.  He is not bound to one setting, he has no technical difficulty in altering the whole scene with every smile and every frown.  To be sure, the theater can give us changing sunshine and thunderclouds too.  But it must go on at the slow pace and with the clumsiness with which the events in nature pass.  The photoplay can flit from one to the other.  Not more than one sixteenth of a second is needed to carry us from one corner of the globe to the other, from a jubilant setting to a mourning scene.  The whole keyboard of the imagination may be used to serve this emotionalizing of nature.