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190 TRICKS, COMPOSITES, CARTOONS
over by another picture? All that can happen to it is that it will be flattened out like a silhouette cut out of paper. Never mind. A pal of his comes along and blows him up again like a fairground toy balloon. A bit too much of a pal, though, for he blows so hard that he makes his friend twice as fat as he was before.
This weightless, material-less freedom from danger was the essence of this old-style film comedy. For in the funniest written story there is still the possibility that a man may die, a thing may be destroyed. But a picture can only be rubbed out, painted over, dissolved or faded out, but never killed.
PSYCHOLOGY AND LENGTH
In the apsychological, mechanical hurly-burly of the old American slapstick comedy the whimsical, clever waggery of camera tricks played a great part. The figures being entirely the creations of the camera without any weight and law of their own, the camera could do with them what it pleased. On the other hand the lack of psychology in the old American slapstick is the cause and explanation of the fact that such films very rarely exceeded the length of a single reel. Mechanical action is not suitable for ringing the changes. However fast may be the movement shown in rough-and-tumbles or pursuits, there is no inner movement in them at all, for whatever may have been the cause of the fight or pursuit, it remains the same, unchanged, to the end and therefore is the manifestation of an unchanged inner condition.
The funny point in these films was always that they could suddenly and unexpectedly find a mechanical solution for some apparently insoluble situation. But such grotesquely surprising suddenness offers no opportunity for developing a slowly rising tension. The unexpected, of which we have no knowledge, cannot produce tension. Only expectation and presentiment can bind events together into a dramatic action which by its progressive unfolding keeps our interest awake for longer periods than the span of the one-reeler. On the other hand expectation and presentiment can arise in the spectator only if he feels that there is a causal connection between