It is only another version of the same principle when the course of events is interrupted by forward glances.  The mental function involved is that of expectation or, when the expectation is controlled by our feelings, we may class it under the mental function of imagination.  The melodrama shows us how the young millionaire wastes his nights in a dissipated life, and when he drinks his blasphemous toast at a champagne feast with shameless women, we suddenly see on the screen the vision of twenty years later when the bartender of a most miserable saloon pushes the penniless tramp out into the gutter.  The last act in the theater may bring us to such an ending, but there it can come only in the regular succession of events.  That pitiful ending cannot be shown to us when life is still blooming and when a twenty years’ downward course is still to be interpreted.  There only our own imagination can anticipate how the mill of life may grind.  In the photoplay our imagination is projected on the screen.  With an uncanny contrast that ultimate picture of defeat breaks in where victory seems most glorious; and five seconds later the story of youth and rapture streams on.  Again we see the course of the natural events remolded by the power of the mind.  The theater can picture only how the real occurrences might follow one another; the photoplay can overcome the interval of the future as well as the interval of the past and slip the day twenty years hence between this minute and the next.  In short, it can act as our imagination acts.  It has the mobility of our ideas which are not controlled by the physical necessity of outer events but by the psychological laws for the association of ideas.  In our mind past and future become intertwined with the present.  The photoplay obeys the laws of the mind rather than those of the outer world.

But the play of memory and imagination can have a still richer significance in the art of the film.  The screen may produce not only what we remember or imagine but what the persons in the play see in their own minds.  The technique of the camera stage has successfully introduced a distinct form for this kind of picturing.  If a person in the scene remembers the past, a past which may be entirely unknown to the spectator but which is living in the memory of the hero or heroine, then the former events are not thrown on the screen as an entirely new set of pictures, but they are connected with the present scene by a slow transition.  He sits at the fireplace in his study and receives the letter with the news of her wedding.  The close-up picture which shows us the enlargement of the engraved wedding announcement appears as an entirely new picture.  The room suddenly disappears and the hand which holds the card flashes up.  Again when we have read the card, it suddenly disappears and we are in the room again.  But when he has dreamily stirred the fire and sits down and gazes into the flames, then the room seems