had, it would have no right to make use of them,
as it would destroy the basis on which the drama is built. We have only
another case of the same type in those series of pictures which aim to
force a suggestion on our mind. We have spoken of them. A certain effect
is prepared by a chain of causes and yet when the causal result is to
appear the film is cut off. We have the causes without the effect. The
villain thrusts with his dagger--but a miracle has snatched away his
victim.

_While the moving pictures are lifted above the world of space and time
and causality and are freed from its bounds, they are certainly not
without law._ We said before that the freedom with which the pictures
replace one another is to a large degree comparable to the sparkling
and streaming of the musical tones. The yielding to the play of the
mental energies, to the attention and emotion, which is felt in the film
pictures, is still more complete in the musical melodies and harmonies
in which the tones themselves are merely the expressions of the ideas
and feelings and will impulses of the mind. Their harmonies and
disharmonies, their fusing and blending, is not controlled by any outer
necessity, but by the inner agreement and disagreement of our free
impulses. And yet in this world of musical freedom, everything is
completely controlled by esthetic necessities. No sphere of practical
life stands under such rigid rules as the realm of the composer. However
bold the musical genius may be he cannot emancipate himself from the
iron rule that his work must show complete unity in itself. All the
separate prescriptions which the musical student has to learn are
ultimately only the consequences of this central demand which music, the
freest of the arts, shares with all the others. In the case of the film,
too, the freedom from the physical forms of space, time, and causality
does not mean any liberation from this esthetic bondage either. On the
contrary, just as music is surrounded by more technical rules than
literature, the photoplay must be held together by the esthetic demands
still more firmly than is the drama. The arts which are subordinated to
the conditions of space, time, and causality find a certain firmness of
structure in these material forms which contain an element of outer
connectedness. But where these forms are given up and where the freedom
of mental play replaces their outer necessity, everything would fall
asunder if the estheti