What is left in the photoplay?
The voice has been stilled: the photoplay is a dumb show.

Yet we must not forget that this alone is a step away from reality which has often been taken in the midst of the dramatic world.

Whoever knows the history of the theater is aware of the tremendous role which the pantomime has played in the development of mankind.

From the old half-religious pantomimic and suggestive dances out of which the beginnings of the real drama grew to the fully religious pantomimes of medieval ages and, further on, to many silent mimic elements in modern performances, we find a continuity of conventions which make the pantomime almost the real background of all dramatic development.

We know how popular the pantomimes were among the Greeks, and how they stood in the foreground in the imperial period of Rome.