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 to dissolve, the lines blur, the details fade away, and while the
walls and the whole room slowly melt, with the same slow transition the
flower garden blossoms out, the flower garden where he and she sat
together under the lilac bush and he confessed to her his boyish love.
And then the garden slowly vanishes and through the flowers we see once
more the dim outlines of the room and they become sharper and sharper
until we are in the midst of the study again and nothing is left of the
vision of the past.

The technique of manufacturing such gradual transitions from one picture
into another and back again demands much patience and is more difficult
than the sudden change, as two exactly corresponding sets of views have
to be produced and finally combined. But this cumbersome method has been