nto cellar and
attic, and jump into the auto and race over the country roads until the
culprit fell over a bridge into the water and was caught by the police.
This slapstick humor has by no means disappeared, but the rapid change
of scenes has meanwhile been put into the service of much higher aims.
The development of an artistic plot has been brought to possibilities
which the real drama does not know, by allowing the eye to follow the
hero and heroine continuously from place to place. Now he leaves his
room, now we see him passing along the street, now he enters the house
of his beloved, now he is led into the parlor, now she is hurrying to
the library of her father, now they all go to the garden: ever new
stage settings sliding into one another. Technical difficulties do not
stand in the way. A set of pictures taken by the camera man a thousand
miles away can be inserted for a few feet in the film, and the audience
sees now the clubroom in New York, and now the snows of Alaska and now
the tropics, near each other in the same reel.

Moreover the ease with which the scenes are altered allows us not only
to hurry on to ever new spots, but to be at the same time in two or
three places. The scenes become intertwined. We see the soldier on the
battlefield, and his beloved one at home, in such steady alternation
that we are simultaneously here and there. We see the man speaking into
the telephone in New York and at the same time the woman who receives
his message in Washington. It is no difficulty at all for the photoplay
to have the two alternate a score of times in the few minutes of the
long distance conversation.

But with the quick change of background the photoartists also gained a
rapidity of motion which leaves actual men behind. He needs only to turn
the crank of the apparatus more quickly and the whole rhythm of the
performance can be brought to a speed which may strikingly aid the
farcical humor of the scene. And from here it was only a step to the
performance of actions which could not be carried out in nature at all.
At first this idea was made serviceable to rather rough comic effects.
The policeman climbed up the solid stone front of a high building. The
camera man had no difficulty in securing the effects, as it was only
necessary to have the actor creep over a flat picture of the building
spread on the floor. Every day brought us new tricks. We see how the
magician breaks one egg after another and takes ou