fully accepted in moving picture making and the effect indeed somewhat
symbolizes the appearance and disappearance of a reminiscence.

This scheme naturally opens wide perspectives. The skilful
photoplaywright can communicate to us long scenes and complicated
developments of the past in the form of such retrospective pictures. The
man who shot his best friend has not offered an explanation in the court
trial which we witness. It remains a perfect secret to the town and a
mystery to the spectator; and now as the jail door closes behind him the
walls of the prison fuse and melt away and we witness the scene in the
little cottage where his friend secretly met his wife and how he broke
in and how it all came about and how he rejected every excuse which
would dishonor his home. The whole murder story becomes embedded in the
reappearance of his memory ideas. The effect is much less artistic when
the photoplay, as not seldom happens, uses this pattern as a mere
substitute for words. In the picturization of a Gaboriau story the woman
declines to tell before the court her life story which ended in a
crime. She finally yields, she begins under oath to describe her whole
past; and at the moment when she opens her mouth the courtroom
disappears and fades into the scene in which the love adventure began.
Then we pass through a long set of scenes which lead to the critical
point, and at that moment we slide back into the courtroom and the woman
finishes her confession. That is an external substitution of the
pictures for the words, esthetically on a much lower level than the
other case where the past was living only in the memory of the witness.
Yet it is again an embodiment of past events which the genuine theater
could offer to the ear but never to the eye.

Just as we can follow the reminiscences of the hero, we may share the
fancies of his imagination. Once more the case is distinctly different