be to lay the chief stress on the fact that those people in the photoplay do not stand before us in flesh and blood.  The essential point is rather that we are conscious of the flatness of the picture.  If we were to see the actors of the stage in a mirror, it would also be a reflected image which we perceive.  We should not really have the actors themselves in our straight line of vision; and yet this image would appear to us equivalent to the actors themselves, because it would contain all the depth of the real stage.  The film picture is such a reflected rendering of the actors.  The process which leads from the living men to the screen is more complex than a mere reflection in a mirror, but in spite of the complexity in the transmission we do, after all, see the real actor in the picture.  The photograph is absolutely different from those pictures which a clever draughtsman has sketched.  In the photoplay we see the actors themselves and the decisive factor which makes the impression different from seeing real men is not that we see the living persons through the medium of photographic reproduction but that this reproduction shows them in a flat form.  The bodily space has been eliminated.  We said once before that stereoscopic arrangements could reproduce somewhat this plastic form also.  Yet this would seriously interfere with the character of the photoplay.  We need there this overcoming of the depth, we want to have it as a picture only and yet as a picture which strongly suggests to us the actual depth of the real world.  We want to keep the interest in the plastic world and want to be aware of the depth in which the persons move, but our direct object of perception must be without the depth.  That idea of space which forces on us most strongly the idea of heaviness, solidity and substantiality must be replaced by the light flitting immateriality.

But the photoplay sacrifices not only the space values of the real theater; it disregards no less its order of time.  The theater presents its plot in the time order of reality.  It may interrupt the continuous flow of time without neglecting the conditions of the dramatic art.  There may be twenty years between the third and the fourth act, inasmuch as the dramatic writer must select those elements spread over space and time which are significant for the development of his story.  But he is bound by the fundamental principle of real time, that it can move only forward and not backward.  Whatever the theater shows us now must come later in the story than that which it showed us in any previous moment.  The strict classical demand for complete unity of time does not fit every drama, but a drama would give up its mission if it told us in the third act something which happened before the second act.  Of course, there may be a play within a play, and the players on the stage which is set on the stage may play events of old Roman history before the king of France.  But this is an enclosure of the past in the present, which corresponds