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136 A PRACTICAL MANUAL OF SCREEN PLAYWRITING
followed, and today dissolves, matched dissolves, and wipes (especially the last) have been relegated to their proper place and importance.
Time lapses impede action. Time lapses tend to slow down the forward action of a picture. Actually, action stops when a time lapse is introduced. Because a time lapse is nothing but a symbol— a motion-picture convention accepted by the audience only by force of habit— it veers tangentially away from realism and, thus, away from action continuity.
The ideal motion picture would be one that uses no time lapse whatsoever. Hitchcock attempted just that in The Rope, where the length of time consumed in showing the film was identical with the length of time covered by the action of the story. But obviously it would be inadvisable, as far as story diversification is concerned, to write all stories within such strict time limits. Hence the need for time-lapse devices.
Telescope story time. This fact must be stressed, though: Try to telescope the time limits of the story. A time-sprawling story saps dramatic intensity because time is a vital dramatic factor. It demands time lapses to cover inordinately long periods of time, such as are encountered in most stories of epic proportions.
Long time lapses destroy continuity by breaking up into two separate stories the two sequences joined by the time lapse. When this is repeated a number of times in the same picture, the result is a series of separate stories with damaged coherence and integration.
In the light of the success of such pictures as Maugham's Quartet and Trio, in which separate and distinct stories with no connective elements of unification were presented as one picture, such advice may seem ill-founded. But these made no pretense of being unified motion pictures. They were frankly presented as separate, short motion pictures to be seen at one sitting, much like a presentation of a group of one-act plays in the theater. It was not necessary to tie up the last story with the opening story, as is essential in the standard motion picture, where the opening sequences must be carefully integrated not only with the closing sequence, but with all the other sequences in the finished picture.