The photoplay; a psychological study (1916)

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THE PHOTOPLAY room. But suddenly, only for three seconds, all the others in the room have disappeared, the bodies of the lovers themselves have faded away, and only his look of longing and her smile of yielding reach out to us. The close-up has done what no theater could have offered by its own means, though we might have approached the effect in the theater performance if we had taken our opera glass ■ and had directed it only to those two heads. But by doing so we should have emancipated ourselves from the offering of the stage pic- ture, that is, the concentration and focusing were secured by us and not by the perform- ance. In the photoplay it is the opposite. Have we not reached by this analysis of the close-up a point very near to that to which the study of depth perception and movement perception was leading? "We saw that the moving pictures give us the plastic world and the moving world, and that nevertheless the depth and the motion in it are not real, unlike the depth and motion of the stage. We find now that the reality of the action in the photo- play in still another respect lacks objective independence, because it yields to our sub- jective play of attention. Wherever our at- 90