The photoplay; a psychological study (1916)

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THE PHOTOPLAY ings appear to the mind plastic and the mov- ing pictures flat? The psychology of this difference is easily misunderstood. Of course, when we are sitting in the picture palace we know that we see a flat screen and that the object which we see has only two dimensions, right-left, and up-down, but not the third dimension of depth, of distance toward us or away from us. It is flat like a picture and never plastic like a work of sculpture or ar- chitecture or like a stage. Yet this is knowl- edge and not immediate impression. We have no right whatever to say that the scenes which we see on the screen appear to us as flat pic- tures. We may become more strongly conscious of this difference between an object of our knowledge and an object of our impression, if we remember a well-known instrument, the stereoscope. The stereoscope, which was quite familiar to the parlor of a former gen- eration, consists of two prisms through which the two eyes look toward two photographic views of a landscape. But the two photo- graphic views are not identical. The land- scape is taken from two different points of view, once from the right and once from the 46