from this inner agreement and harmony, but in order that we may feel such agreement of the parts we must enter with our own impulses into the will of every element, into the meaning of every line and color and form, every word and tone and note.  Only if everything is full of such inner movement can we really enjoy the harmonious cooeperation of the parts.  The means of the various arts, we saw, are the forms and methods by which this aim is fulfilled.  They must be different for every material.  Moreover the same material may allow very different methods of isolation and elimination of the insignificant and reenforcement of that which contributes to the harmony.  If we ask now what are the characteristic means by which the photoplay succeeds in overcoming reality, in isolating a significant dramatic story and in presenting it so that we enter into it and yet keep it away from our practical life and enjoy the harmony of the parts, we must remember all the results to which our psychological discussion in the first part of the book has led us.

We recognized there that the photoplay, incomparable in this respect with the drama, gave us a view of dramatic events which was completely shaped by the inner movements of the mind.  To be sure, the events in the photoplay happen in the real space with its depth.  But the spectator feels that they are not presented in the three dimensions of the outer world, that they are flat pictures which only the mind molds into plastic things.  Again the events are seen in continuous movement; and yet the pictures break up the movement into a rapid succession of instantaneous impressions.  We do not see the objective reality, but a product of our own mind which binds the pictures together.  But much stronger differences came to light when we turned to the processes of attention, of memory, of imagination, of suggestion, of division of interest and of emotion.  The attention turns to detailed points in the outer world and ignores everything else:  the photoplay is doing exactly this when in the close-up a detail is enlarged and everything else disappears.  Memory breaks into present events by bringing up pictures of the past:  the photoplay is doing this by its frequent cut-backs, when pictures of events long past flit between those of the present.  The imagination anticipates the future or overcomes reality by fancies and dreams; the photoplay is doing all this more richly than any chance imagination would succeed in doing.  But chiefly, through our division of interest our mind is drawn hither and thither.  We think of events which run parallel in different places.  The photoplay can show in intertwined scenes everything which our mind embraces.  Events in three or four or five regions of the world can be woven together into one complex action.  Finally, we saw that every shade of feeling and emotion which fills the spectator’s mind can mold the scenes in the photoplay until they appear the embodiment of our feelings.  In every one of these aspects the photoplay succeeds in doing what the drama of the theater does not attempt.