NICHOLS AND MAY
Silent films seem to me to have required far more active and uninterrupted concentration than sound films do. We had to put a great many two-and-two’s together which the author and the actor and the director put together for the audiences of today; we collected materials from a rapid-fire hail of images, made in our own minds combinations which left considerable room open for individuality of interpretation, and drew our own conclusions in correspondence with our own personalities and scales of value. I have never known what it means, in any form of art, to “identify” myself, as many people say they do, with the hero or heroine, and I very much doubt that those who claim that this happens to them are accurately reporting their own experiences. In many cases, I am sure, they do not mean that they experience anything more than a very close and intense sympathy, or that they have learned how to look out upon the world, for the moment, through another person’s eyes. This experience is one of art’s most important functions to give us, but when we pass beyond sympathy to identification, we also leave the sane world of art for a private world of self-delusion. I myself, at any rate, am always aware of the character’s individuality and of my own, and of the reaction of the one to the other, and in the case of all forms of dramatic art, I am conscious further of the distinction which must be made between the character and the human being who embodies him.
