and
shadowlike the moving picture play appeared compared with the
performance of living actors, the advantage of the cheap multiplication
was so great that the ambition of the producers was natural, to go
forward from the little playlets to great dramas which held the
attention for hours. The kinematographic theater soon had its
Shakespeare repertoire; Ibsen has been played and the dramatized novels
on the screen became legion. Victor Hugo and Dickens scored new
triumphs. In a few years the way from the silly trite practical joke to
Hamlet and Peer Gynt was covered with such thoroughness that the
possibility of giving a photographic rendering of any thinkable theater
performance was proven for all time.

But while this movement to reproduce stage performances went on,
elements were superadded which the technique of the camera allowed but
which would hardly be possible in a theater. Hence the development led
slowly to a certain deviation from the path of the drama. The difference
which strikes the observer first results from the chance of the camera
man to set his scene in the real backgrounds of nature and culture. The
stage manager of the theater can paint the ocean and, if need be, can
move some colored cloth to look like rolling waves; and yet how far is
his effect surpassed by the superb ocean pictures when the scene is
played on the real cliffs and the waves are thundering at their foot and
the surf is foaming about the actors. The theater has its painted
villages and vistas, its city streets and its foreign landscape
backgrounds. But here the theater, 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, i