performance can be brought to a speed which may strikingly aid the
farcical humor of the scene. And from here it was only a step to the
performance of actions which could not be carried out in nature at all.
At first this idea was made serviceable to rather rough comic effects.
The policeman climbed up the solid stone front of a high building. The
camera man had no difficulty in securing the effects, as it was only
necessary to have the actor creep over a flat picture of the building
spread on the floor. Every day brought us new tricks. We see how the
magician breaks one egg after another and takes out of each egg a little
fairy and puts one after another on his hand where they begin to dance a
minuet. No theater could ever try to match such wonders, but for the
camera they are not difficult; the little dancers were simply at a much
further distance from the camera and therefore appeared in their
Lilliputian size. Rich artistic effects have been secured, and while on
the stage every fairy play is clumsy and hardly able to create an
illusion, in the film we really see the man transformed into a beast and
the flower into a girl. There is no limit to the trick pictures which
the skill of the experts invent. The divers jump, feet first, out of
the water to the springboard. It looks magical, and yet the camera man
has simply to reverse his film and to run it from the end to the
beginning of the action. Every dream becomes real, uncanny ghosts appear
from nothing and disappear into nothing, mermaids swim through the waves
and little elves climb out of the Easter lilies.

As the crank of the camera which takes the pictures can be stopped at
any moment and the turning renewed only after some complete change has
been made on the stage any substitution can be carried out without the
public knowing of the break in the events. We see a man walking to the
edge of a steep rock, leaving no doubt that it is a real person, and
then by a slip he is hurled down into the abyss below. The film does not