hen we have read the card, it suddenly
disappears and we are in the room again. But when he has dreamily
stirred the fire and sits down and gazes into the flames, then the room
seems to dissolve, the lines blur, the details fade away, and while the
walls and the whole room slowly melt, with the same slow transition the
flower garden blossoms out, the flower garden where he and she sat
together under the lilac bush and he confessed to her his boyish love.
And then the garden slowly vanishes and through the flowers we see once
more the dim outlines of the room and they become sharper and sharper
until we are in the midst of the study again and nothing is left of the
vision of the past.

The technique of manufacturing such gradual transitions from one picture
into another and back again demands much patience and is more difficult
than the sudden change, as two exactly corresponding sets of views have
to be produced and finally combined. But this cumbersome method has been
fully accepted in moving picture making and the effect indeed somewhat
symbolizes the appearance and disappearance of a reminiscence.

This scheme naturally opens wide perspectives. The skilful
photoplaywright can communicate to us long scenes and complicated
developments of the past in the form of such retrospective pictures. The
man who shot his best friend has not offered an explanation in the court
trial which we witness. It remains a perfect secret to the town and a
mystery to the spectator; and now as the jail door closes behind him the
walls of the prison fuse and melt away and we witness the scene in the
little cottage where his friend secretly met his wife and how he broke
in and how it all came about and how he rejected every excuse which
would dishonor his home. The whole murder story becomes embedded in the
reappearance of his memory ideas. The effect is much less artistic when
the photoplay, as not seldom happens, uses this pattern as a mere
substitute for words. In the picturization of a Gaboriau story the woman
declines to tell before the court her life story which ended in a
crime. She finally yields, she begins under oath to describe her whole
past; and at the moment when she opens her mouth the courtroom
disappears and fades into the scene in which the love adventure began.
Then we pass through a long set of scenes which lead to the critical
point, and at that moment we slide back into the courtroom and the woman
finishes her confession