He who lifts his arm while the others stand quiet has gained our attention.  Above all, every gesture, every play of the features, brings order and rhythm into the manifoldness of the impressions and organizes them for our mind.  Again, the quick action, the unusual action, the repeated action, the unexpected action, the action with strong outer effect, will force itself on our mind and unbalance the mental equilibrium.

The question arises:  how does the photoplay secure the needed shifting of attention?  Here, too, involuntary attention alone can be expected.  An attention which undertakes its explorations guided by preconceived ideas instead of yielding to the demands of the play would lack adjustment to its task.  We might sit through the photoplay with the voluntary intention of watching the pictures with a scientific interest in order to detect some mechanical traits of the camera, or with a practical interest, in order to look up some new fashions, or with a professional interest, in order to find out in what New England scenery these pictures of Palestine might have been photographed.  But none of these aspects has anything to do with the photoplay.  If we follow the play in a genuine attitude of theatrical interest, we must accept those cues for our attention which the playwright and the producers have prepared for us.  But there is surely no lack of means by which our mind can be influenced and directed in the rapid play of the pictures.

Of course the spoken word is lacking.  We know how often the words on the screen serve as substitutes for the speech of the actors.  They appear sometimes as so-called “leaders” between the pictures, sometimes even thrown into the picture itself, sometimes as content of a written letter or of a telegram or of a newspaper clipping which is projected like a picture, strongly enlarged, on the screen.  In all these cases the words themselves prescribe the line in which the attention must move and force the interest of the spectator toward the new goal.  But such help by the writing on the wall is, after all, extraneous to the original character of the photoplay.  As long as we study the psychological effect of the moving pictures themselves, we must concentrate our inquiry on the moving pictures as such and not on that which the playwright does for the interpretation of the pictures.  It may be granted that the letters and newspaper articles take a middle place.  They are a part of the picture, but their influence on the spectator is, nevertheless, very similar to that of the leaders.  We are here concerned only with what the pictorial offering contains.  We must therefore also disregard the accompanying music or the imitative noises which belong to the technique of the full-fledged photoplay nowadays.  They do not a little to push the attention hither and thither.  Yet they are accessory, while the primary power must lie in the content of the pictures themselves.