one action irradiates in all directions. Of course, this can easily be
exaggerated, and the result must be a certain restlessness. If the scene
changes too often and no movement is carried on without a break, the
play may irritate us by its nervous jerking from place to place. Near
the end of the Theda Bara edition of Carmen the scene changes one
hundred and seventy times in ten minutes, an average of a little more
than three seconds for each scene. We follow Don Jose and Carmen and the
toreador in ever new phases of the dramatic action and are constantly
carried back to Don Jose's home village where his mother waits for him.
There indeed the dramatic tension has an element of nervousness, in
contrast to the Geraldine Farrar version of Carmen which allows a more
unbroken development of the single action.

But whether it is used with artistic reserve or with a certain dangerous
exaggeration, in any case its psychological meaning is obvious. It
demonstrates to us in a new form the same principle which the perception
of depth and of movement, the acts of attention and of memory and of
imagination have shown. _The objective world is molded by the interests
of the mind. Events which are far distant from one another so that we
could not be physically present at all of them at the same time are
fusing in our field of vision, just as they are brought together in our
own consciousness._ Psychologists are still debating whether the mind
can ever devote itself to several groups of ideas at the same time. Some
claim that any so-called division of attention is really a rapid
alteration. Yet in any case subjectively we experience it as an actual
division. Our mind is split and can be here and there apparently in one
mental act. This inner division, this awareness of contrasting
situations, this interchange of diverging experiences in the soul, can
never be embodied except in the photoplay.