effect, even if the mere showing of movement
has today lost its impressiveness. Moreover we are captivated by the
undeniable beauty of many settings. The melodrama may be cheap; yet it
does not disturb the cultured mind as grossly as a similar tragic
vulgarity would on the real stage, because it may have the snowfields of
Alaska or the palm trees of Florida as radiant background. An
intellectual interest, too, finds its satisfaction. We get an insight
into spheres which were strange to us. Where outlying regions of human
interest are shown on the theater stage, we must usually be satisfied
with some standardized suggestion. Here in the moving pictures the play
may really bring us to mills and factories, to farms and mines, to
courtrooms and hospitals, to castles and palaces in any land on earth.

Yet a stronger power of the photoplay probably lies in its own dramatic
qualities. The rhythm of the play is marked by unnatural rapidity. As
the words are absent which, in the drama as in life, fill the gaps
between the actions, the gestures and deeds themselves can follow one
another much more quickly. Happenings which would fill an hour on the
stage can hardly fill more than twenty minutes on the screen. This
heightens the feeling of vitality in the spectator. He feels as if he
were passing through life with a sharper accent which stirs his personal
energies. The usual make-up of the photoplay must strengthen this effect
inasmuch as the wordlessness of the picture drama favors a certain
simplification of the social conflicts. The subtler shades of the
motives naturally demand speech. The later plays of Ibsen could hardly
be transformed into photoplays. Where words are missing the characters
tend to become stereotyped and the motives to be deprived of their
complexity. The plot of the photoplay is usually based on the
fundamental emotions which are common to all and which are understood
by everybody. Love and hate, gratitude and envy, hope and fear, pity and
jealousy, repentance and sinfulness, and all the similar crude emotions
have been sufficient for the construction of most scenarios. The more
mature development of the photoplay will certainly overcome this
primitive character, as, while such an effort to reduce human life to
simple instincts is very convenient for the photoplay, it is not at all
necessary. In any case where this tendency prevails it must help greatly
to excite and to intensify the personal feeling of lif