a few seconds.  There is love in her smiling face, and yet we overlook it as they stand in a crowded 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 picture, that is, the concentration and focusing were secured by us and not by the performance.  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 photoplay in still another respect lacks objective independence, because it yields to our subjective play of attention.  Wherever our attention becomes focused on a special feature, the surrounding adjusts itself, eliminates everything in which we are not interested, and by the close-up heightens the vividness of that on which our mind is concentrated.  It is as if that outer world were woven into our mind and were shaped not through its own laws but by the acts of our attention.

CHAPTER V

MEMORY AND IMAGINATION

When we sit in a real theater and see the stage with its depth and watch the actors moving and turn our attention hither and thither, we feel that those impressions from behind the footlights have objective character, while the action of our attention is subjective.  Those men and things come from without but the play of the attention starts from within.  Yet our attention, as we have seen, does not really add anything to the impressions of the stage.  It makes some more vivid and clear while others become vague or fade away, but through the attention alone no content enters our consciousness.  Wherever our attention may wander on the stage, whatever we experience comes to us through the channels of our senses.  The spectator in the audience, however, does experience more than merely the light and sound sensations which fall on the eye and ear at that moment.  He may be entirely fascinated by the actions on the stage and yet his mind may be overflooded with other ideas.  Only one of their sources, but not the least important one, is the memory.