The Photoplay | Page 8

in spite of the reality of the actors,
appears thoroughly unreal compared with the throbbing life of the
street scenes and of the foreign crowds in which the camera man finds
his local color.
But still more characteristic is the rapidity with which the whole
background can be changed in the moving pictures. Reinhardt's
revolving stage had brought wonderful surprises to the theater-goer and
had shifted the scene with a quickness which was unknown before. Yet
how slow and clumsy does it remain compared with the routine
changes of the photoplays. This changing of background is so easy for
the camera that at a very early date this new feature of the plays was
introduced. At first it served mostly humorous purposes. The public of
the crude early shows enjoyed the flashlike quickness with which it
could follow the eloper over the roofs of the town, upstairs and down,
into cellar and attic, and jump into the auto and race over the country

roads until the culprit fell over a bridge into the water and was caught
by the police. This slapstick humor has by no means disappeared, but
the rapid change of scenes has meanwhile been put into the service of
much higher aims. The development of an artistic plot has been brought
to possibilities which the real drama does not know, by allowing the
eye to follow the hero and heroine continuously from place to place.
Now he leaves his room, now we see him passing along the street, now
he enters the house of his beloved, now he is led into the parlor, now
she is hurrying to the library of her father, now they all go to the garden:
ever new stage settings sliding into one another. Technical difficulties
do not stand in the way. A set of pictures taken by the camera man a
thousand miles away can be inserted for a few feet in the film, and the
audience sees now the clubroom in New York, and now the snows of
Alaska and now the tropics, near each other in the same reel.
Moreover the ease with which the scenes are altered allows us not only
to hurry on to ever new spots, but to be at the same time in two or three
places. The scenes become intertwined. We see the soldier on the
battlefield, and his beloved one at home, in such steady alternation that
we are simultaneously here and there. We see the man speaking into the
telephone in New York and at the same time the woman who receives
his message in Washington. It is no difficulty at all for the photoplay to
have the two alternate a score of times in the few minutes of the long
distance conversation.
But with the quick change of background the photoartists also gained a
rapidity of motion which leaves actual men behind. He needs only to
turn the crank of the apparatus more quickly and the whole rhythm of
the performance can be brought to a speed which may strikingly aid the
farcical humor of the scene. And from here it was only a step to the
performance of actions which could not be carried out in nature at all.
At first this idea was made serviceable to rather rough comic effects.
The policeman climbed up the solid stone front of a high building. The
camera man had no difficulty in securing the effects, as it was only
necessary to have the actor creep over a flat picture of the building
spread on the floor. Every day brought us new tricks. We see how the
magician breaks one egg after another and takes out of each egg a little

fairy and puts one after another on his hand where they begin to dance
a minuet. No theater could ever try to match such wonders, but for the
camera they are not difficult; the little dancers were simply at a much
further distance from the camera and therefore appeared in their
Lilliputian size. Rich artistic effects have been secured, and while on
the stage every fairy play is clumsy and hardly able to create an illusion,
in the film we really see the man transformed into a beast and the
flower into a girl. There is no limit to the trick pictures which the skill
of the experts invent. The divers jump, feet first, out of the water to the
springboard. It looks magical, and yet the camera man has simply to
reverse his film and to run it from the end to the beginning of the action.
Every dream becomes real, uncanny ghosts appear from nothing and
disappear into nothing, mermaids swim through the waves and little
elves climb out of the Easter lilies.
As the crank of the camera which takes the pictures