For the news pictures of the day the "kinemacolor" and similar
schemes are excellent. But when we come to photoplays the question is no
longer one of technique; first of all we stand before the problem: how
far does the coloring subordinate itself to the aim of the photoplay? No
doubt the effect of the individual picture would be heightened by the
beauty of the colors. But would it heighten the beauty of the photoplay?
Would not this color be again an addition which oversteps the essential
limits of this particular art? We do not want to paint the cheeks of the
Venus of Milo: neither do we want to see the coloring of Mary Pickford
or Anita Stewart. We became aware that the unique task of the photoplay
art can be fulfilled only by a far-reaching disregard of reality. The
real human persons and the real landscapes must be left behind and, as
we saw, must be transformed into pictorial suggestions only. We must be
strongly conscious of their pictorial unreality in order that that
wonderful play of our inner experiences may be realized on the screen.
This consciousness of unreality must seriously suffer from the addition
of color. We are once more brought too near to the world which really
surrounds us with the richness of its colors, and the more we approach
it the less we gain that inner freedom, that victory of the mind over
nature, which remains the ideal of the photoplay. The colors are almost
as detrimental as the voices.

On the other hand the producer must be careful to keep sufficiently in
contact with reality, as otherwise the emotional interests upon which
the whole play depends would be destroyed. We must not take the people
to be real, but we must link with them all the feelings and associations
which we would connect with real men. This is possible only if in their
flat, colorless, pictorial setting they share the real features of men.
For this reason it is important to suggest to the spectator the
impression of natural size. The demand of the imagination for the normal
size of the persons and things in the picture is so strong that it
easily and constantly overcomes great enlargements or reductions. We see
at first a man in his normal size and then by a close-up an excessive
enlargement of his head. Yet we do not feel it as if the person himself
were enlarged. By a characteristic psychical substitution we feel rather
that we have come nearer to him and that the size of the visual image
was increased by the dec