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