ABSTRACT
During the years 1895-1911 Henry James felt the need for, and indeed described, an art that revitalised fiction's status as 'the illusion of life'. While he was trying to fascinate his readership with telling visual compositions, another form of visually oriented storytelling was being attempted, a form that relied quite similarly upon displayed space and suggestive dumb-show. His involvements and dissatisfactions with the theatre immediately preceded and coincided with the very early development of the fiction film. When he adapted ellipsis to the stage he collocated it with empty space, thus contextualising space and silence, or framing them, within a relationship between two or more characters. On stage, where movement, as a rule of thumb for the director, sustains interest, he choreographed his characters to stop, distances apart, to render the spaces between them remarkable, communicative of inference. These gaps were to draw the audience's attention to an area similarly devoid of a voice.
