We should block our way if we were to start from the theater and were to ask how much is left out in the mere photographic substitute.

We approach the art of the film theater as if it stood entirely on its own ground, and extinguish all memory of the world of actors.

We analyze the mental processes which this specific form of artistic endeavor produces in us.
To begin at the beginning, the photoplay consists of a series of flat pictures in contrast to the plastic objects of the real world which surrounds us.

But we may stop at once: what does it mean to say that the surroundings appear to the mind plastic and the moving pictures flat?
The psychology of this difference is easily misunderstood.

Of course, when we are sitting in the picture palace we know that we see a flat screen and that the object which we see has only two dimensions, right-left, and up-down, but not the third dimension of depth, of distance toward us or away from us.