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 from the one in which we, the spectators, had our imaginative ideas realized on the screen.