st a disastrous failure of the art of
the film. The color of the world has disappeared, the persons are dumb,
no sound reaches our ear. The depth of the scene appears unreal, the
motion has lost its natural character. Worst of all, the objective
course of events is falsified; our own attention and memory and
imagination have shifted and remodeled the events until they look as
nature could never show them. What we really see can hardly be called
any longer an imitation of the world, such as the theater gives us.

When the graphophone repeats a Beethoven symphony, the voluminousness of
the orchestra is reduced to a thin feeble surface sound, and no one
would accept this product of the disk and the diaphragm as a full
substitute for the performance of the real orchestra. But, after all,
every instrument is actually represented, and we can still discriminate
the violins and the celli and the flutes in exactly the same order and
tonal and rhythmic relation in which they appear in the original. The
graphophone music appears, therefore, much better fitted for replacing
the orchestra than the moving pictures are to be a substitute for the
theater. There all the essential elements seem conserved; here just the
essentials seem to be lost and the aim of the drama to imitate life with
the greatest possible reality seems hopelessly beyond the flat,
colorless pictures of the photoplay. Still more might we say that the
plaster of Paris cast is a fair substitute for the marble statue. It
shares with the beautiful marble work the same form and imitates the
body of the living man just as well as the marble statue. Moreover,
this product of the mechanical process has the same white color which
the original work of the sculptor possesses. Hence we must acknowledge
it as a fair approach to the plastic work of art. In the same way the
chromo print gives the essentials of the oil painting. Everywhere the
technical process has secured a reproduction of the work of art which
sounds or looks almost like the work of the great artist, and only the
technique of the moving pictures, which so clearly tries to reproduce
the theater performance, stands so utterly far behind the art of the
actor. Is not an esthetic judgment of rejection demanded by good taste
and sober criticism? We may tolerate the photoplay because, by the
inexpensive technical method which allows an unlimited multiplication of
the performances, it brings at least a shadow of the theat