We know how often the words on the screen serve as substitutes for the speech of the actors.

They appear sometimes as so-called "leaders" between the pictures, sometimes even thrown into the picture itself, sometimes as content of a written letter or of a telegram or of a newspaper clipping which is projected like a picture, strongly enlarged, on the screen.

In all these cases the words themselves prescribe the line in which the attention must move and force the interest of the spectator toward the new goal.

But such help by the writing on the wall is, after all, extraneous to the original character of the photoplay.

As long as we study the psychological effect of the moving pictures themselves, we must concentrate our inquiry on the moving pictures as such and not on that which the playwright does for the interpretation of the pictures.