t of each egg a little
fairy and puts one after another on his hand where they begin to dance a
minuet. No theater could ever try to match such wonders, but for the
camera they are not difficult; the little dancers were simply at a much
further distance from the camera and therefore appeared in their
Lilliputian size. Rich artistic effects have been secured, and while on
the stage every fairy play is clumsy and hardly able to create an
illusion, in the film we really see the man transformed into a beast and
the flower into a girl. There is no limit to the trick pictures which
the skill of the experts invent. The divers jump, feet first, out of
the water to the springboard. It looks magical, and yet the camera man
has simply to reverse his film and to run it from the end to the
beginning of the action. Every dream becomes real, uncanny ghosts appear
from nothing and disappear into nothing, mermaids swim through the waves
and little elves climb out of the Easter lilies.

As the crank of the camera which takes the pictures can be stopped at
any moment and the turning renewed only after some complete change has
been made on the stage any substitution can be carried out without the
public knowing of the break in the events. We see a man walking to the
edge of a steep rock, leaving no doubt that it is a real person, and
then by a slip he is hurled down into the abyss below. The film does not
indicate that at the instant before the fall the camera has been stopped
and the actor replaced by a stuffed dummy which begins to tumble when
the movement of the film is started again. But not only dummies of the
same size can be introduced. A little model brought quite near to the
camera may take the place of the large real object at a far distance. We
see at first the real big ship and can convince ourselves of its
reality by seeing actual men climbing up the rigging. But when it comes
to the final shipwreck, the movement of the film is stopped and the
camera brought near to a little tank where a miniature model of the ship
takes up the role of the original and explodes and really sinks to its
two-feet-deep watery grave.

While, through this power to make impossible actions possible, unheard
of effects could be reached, all still remained in the outer framework
of the stage. The photoplay showed a performance, however rapid or
unusual, as it would go on in the outer world. An entirely new
perspective was opened when the managers of th