ABSTRACT
Whatever its length, ‘clumsy’ ellipsis (lapsed time) was received as an anomaly exclusively characteristic of cinema. We may recall Yuli Engel’s 1908 article, where he observed that the lover ‘was round in a flash’ after the letter had been sent to him. This became a standing joke in the 1910s. In his original and ironic
catechism of the diegetic ‘peculiarities’ of cinema Georg German wrote in 1914: ‘Why does love move so fast? The girl behind the counter or the cash register has hardly set eyes on the young lord before she is sitting in front of him, abandoned and grief-stricken, with the baby in her arms.’2 Another reviewer for The Theatre Paper, writing about Yevgeni Bauer’s film Leon Drey (1915), exclaimed with mock bewilderment: ‘What kind of a man is this Leon Drey, who kisses a different woman in each tableau and betrays the heroine of the previous one?’3 In both cases the irony manifests a rejection of the new (‘jerky’) narrative conventions or, rather, cinema’s inability to live up to older narrative norms.
