There is a girl in her little room, and she opens a letter and reads it.  There is no need of showing us in a close-up the letter page with the male handwriting and the words of love and the request for her hand.  We see it in her radiant visage, we read it from her fascinated arms and hands; and yet how much more can the photoartist tell us about the storm of emotions in her soul.  The walls of her little room fade away.  Beautiful hedges of hawthorn blossom around her, rose bushes in wonderful glory arise and the whole ground is alive with exotic flowers.  Or the young artist sits in his attic playing his violin; we see the bow moving over the strings but the dreamy face of the player does not change with his music.  Under the spell of his tones his features are immovable as if they were staring at a vision.  They do not speak of the changing emotions which his melodies awake.  We cannot hear those tones.  And yet we do hear them:  a lovely spring landscape widens behind his head, we see the valleys of May and the bubbling brooks and the young wild beeches.  And slowly it changes into the sadness of the autumn, the sere leaves are falling around the player, heavy clouds hang low over his head.  Suddenly at a sharp accent of his bow the storm breaks, we are carried to the wildness of rugged rocks or to the raging sea; and again comes tranquillity over the world, the little country village of his youth fills the background, the harvest is brought from the fields, the sun sets upon a scene of happiness, and while the bow slowly sinks, the walls and ceiling of his attic close in again.  No shade, no tint, no hue of his emotions has escaped us; we followed them as if we had heard the rejoicing and the sadness, the storm and the peace of his melodious tones.  Such imaginative settings can be only the extreme; they would not be fit for the routine play.  But, however much weaker and fainter the echo of the surroundings may be in the realistic pictures of the standard photoplay, the chances are abundant everywhere and no skillful playwright will ever disregard them entirely.  Not the portrait of the man but the picture as a whole has to be filled with emotional exuberance.

Everything so far has referred to the emotions of the persons in the play, but this cannot be sufficient.  When we were interested in attention and memory we did not ask about the act of attention and memory in the persons of the play, but in the spectator, and we recognized that these mental activities and excitements in the audience were projected into the moving pictures.  Just here was the center of our interest, because it showed that uniqueness of the means with which the photoplaywright can work.  If we want to shape the question now in the same way, we ought to ask how it is with the emotions of the spectator.  But then two different groups of cases must be distinguished.  On the one side we have those emotions in which the feelings of the persons in the play are transmitted to our own soul.  On the other side, we find those feelings with which we respond to the scenes in the play, feelings which may be entirely different, perhaps exactly opposite to those which the figures in the play express.