Subjective effects

It was during this period that camera effects intended to convey the subjective feelings of characters in a film really began to be established. These could now be done as Point of View (POV) shots, as in Sidney Drew's The Story of the Glove (1915), where a wobbly hand-held shot of a door and its keyhole represents the POV of a drunken man. In Poor Little Rich Girl (1917) a camera shot tilting sideways is intended to convey delirium, and by 1918 the idea had got to Russia, in Baryshnya i khuligan (The Lady and the Hooligan), where the Hooligan's infatuation with the Lady is conveyed by his Point of View of her splitting into a multiply superimposed image. The use of anamorphic (in the general sense of distorted shape) images first appears in these years with Abel Gance's la Folie du Docteur Tube (The Madness of Dr. Tube). In this film the effect of a drug administered to a group of people was suggested by shooting the scenes reflected in a distorting mirror of the fair-ground type. Later we have Till the Clouds Roll By(Victor Fleming, 1919), where anamorphosis is used to depict the nightmare effects of indigestion in a comic manner. In fact, like so many film effects that distort the representation of reality, anamorphosis was first used exclusively in comic contexts.