om his office. She had promised
her poor old parents to be home early. We see the gorgeous roof garden
and the tango dances, but our dramatic interest is divided among the
frivolous pair, the jealous young woman in the suburban cottage, and the
anxious old people in the attic. Our mind wavers among the three scenes.
The photoplay shows one after another. Yet it can hardly be said that we
think of them as successive. It is as if we were really at all three
places at once. We see the joyous dance which is of central dramatic
interest for twenty seconds, then for three seconds the wife in her
luxurious boudoir looking at the dial of the clock, for three seconds
again the grieved parents eagerly listening for any sound on the stairs,
and anew for twenty seconds the turbulent festival. The frenzy reaches a
climax, and in that moment we are suddenly again with his unhappy wife;
it is only a flash, and the next instant we see the tears of the girl's
poor mother. The three scenes proceed almost as if no one were
interrupted at all. It is as if we saw one through another, as if three
tones blended into one chord.

There is no limit to the number of threads which may be interwoven. A
complex intrigue may demand cooeperation at half a dozen spots, and we
look now into one, now into another, and never have the impression that
they come one after another. The temporal element has disappeared, the
one action irradiates in all directions. Of course, this can easily be
exaggerated, and the result must be a certain restlessness. If the scene
changes too often and no movement is carried on without a break, the
play may irritate us by its nervous jerking from place to place. Near
the end of the Theda Bara edition of Carmen the scene changes one
hundred and seventy times in ten minutes, an average of a little more
than three seconds for each scene. We follow Don Jose and Carmen and the
toreador in ever new phases of the dramatic action and are constantly
carried back to Don Jose's home village where his mother waits for him.
There indeed the dramatic tension has an element of nervousness, in
contrast to the Geraldine Farrar version of Carmen which allows a more
unbroken development of the single action.

But whether it is used with artistic reserve or with a certain dangerous
exaggeration, in any case its psychological meaning is obvious. It
demonstrates to us in a new form the same principle which the perception
of depth and of movement,