aire wastes his nights in a
dissipated life, and when he drinks his blasphemous toast at a champagne
feast with shameless women, we suddenly see on the screen the vision of
twenty years later when the bartender of a most miserable saloon pushes
the penniless tramp out into the gutter. The last act in the theater may
bring us to such an ending, but there it can come only in the regular
succession of events. That pitiful ending cannot be shown to us when
life is still blooming and when a twenty years' downward course is still
to be interpreted. There only our own imagination can anticipate how the
mill of life may grind. In the photoplay our imagination is projected on
the screen. With an uncanny contrast that ultimate picture of defeat
breaks in where victory seems most glorious; and five seconds later the
story of youth and rapture streams on. Again we see the course of the
natural events remolded by the power of the mind. The theater can
picture only how the real occurrences might follow one another; the
photoplay can overcome the interval of the future as well as the
interval of the past and slip the day twenty years hence between this
minute and the next. In short, it can act as our imagination acts. It
has the mobility of our ideas which are not controlled by the physical
necessity of outer events but by the psychological laws for the
association of ideas. In our mind past and future become intertwined
with the present. The photoplay obeys the laws of the mind rather than
those of the outer world.

But the play of memory and imagination can have a still richer
significance in the art of the film. The screen may produce not only
what we remember or imagine but what the persons in the play see in
their own minds. The technique of the camera stage has successfully
introduced a distinct form for this kind of picturing. If a person in
the scene remembers the past, a past which may be entirely unknown to
the spectator but which is living in the memory of the hero or heroine,
then the former events are not thrown on the screen as an entirely new
set of pictures, but they are connected with the present scene by a slow
transition. He sits at the fireplace in his study and receives the
letter with the news of her wedding. The close-up picture which shows
us the enlargement of the engraved wedding announcement appears as an
entirely new picture. The room suddenly disappears and the hand which
holds the card flashes up. Again w