Pictorial Beauty on the Screen

by Victor Oscar Freeburg

The white expanse of fleecy clouds would shock the eyes at first sight, since the approach to the subject had not been properly made; but in a moment we would be stirred by the feeling that we were really above the clouds. We would seem to have passed into a new world with floods of mist. The long stretches of white are soft as eiderdown, yet, because of our own motion, they seem like the currents of a broad river, and one can almost imagine that it were possible to steer a canoe over those rapids. All this would be the second thrill, beautiful in itself but not actually tending to emphasize the “punch” of a man transferring from one airplane to another.

The third thrill would surely come when the hydro-airplane swings up through these clouds, like a dolphin from the sea, and yet not like a dolphin, because it rises more slowly and in a few moments soars freely into the air, a marvellous happening which no words can describe. Yet this thrill, like the others, would exhaust our emotions rather than leave them fresh for the “punch” we started out to produce, the transfer of a man from one airplane to another.

Most thrilling of all would be the moments between the instant when the villain is pushed off the wing of the plane and the instant when his parachute snaps open. The white mass of the parachute, almost like a tiny cloud, spreads out at the instant when it reaches the layer of clouds, as if they pushed it open; then the parachute sinks into the clouds and dies out like a wave of the sea.

After all these thrills, the intended “punch” would come like a slap on the wrist. A man might now leap back and forth from one airplane to another until it was time to go home for supper, and we would only yawn at his exploits.

Now one of the morals of this story is that we did get a “punch,” even though it was not the one originally intended by our imagined producer. Treasures often lie in unsuspected places. Nearly every common-place film on the screen contains some beauty by accident, some unexpected charm, some unforseen “punch,” something the director never dreamed of, which outshines the very beauty which he aimed to produce. And whenever a thoughtful person is stirred by such accidental beauty he is delighted to think that such a thing is possible. In the exceptional films, he knows, such effects are produced by design instead of by chance. It is better business, and it is better art.

We said at the beginning of this chapter that it was clearly desirable to economize the spectator’s efforts of looking and seeing, in order that he may have the greatest possible amount of energy left for the experience of emotion. This is desirable even from a business man’s point of view. We shall now try to show that emotional thrills can actually be controlled by design, by what we shall call pictorial composition.

But how is pictorial composition controlled, and who controls it? How far is the scenario writer responsible for pictorial value? How much of the pictorial composition shall the director direct, and how much of it may safely be left to other hands? And, if a picture is well composed, does that guarantee beauty? The answers to these questions depend upon our definition of terms.

Composition in general means, of course, simply bringing things together into a mutual relation. A particular combination of parts in a picture may help the spectator, or may hinder him more than some other possible combination of the same parts. Composition is form, and as such should be revealing and expressive at the same time that it is appealing in itself. Good composition cannot easily be defined in a single sentence, but, for the sake of order in our discussion, I wish to offer the following as my working definition. The best cinema composition is that arrangement of elements in a scene or succession of scenes which enables us to see the most with the least difficulty and the deepest feeling.

A remarkable thing about composition is that it cannot be avoided. Every picture must have some kind of arrangement, whether that arrangement be good, bad, or indifferent. As soon as an actor enters a room he makes a composition, because every gesture, every movement, every line of his body bears some pictorial relation to everything else within range of our vision. Even to draw a single line or to prick a single point upon a sheet of paper is to start a composition, because such a mark must bear some relation to the four unavoidable lines which are described by the edges of the paper.

To place a flower in a vase is to make a composition. If the arrangement contains more meaning, more significance than the exhibition of the flower and the vase separately, and if this meaning can easily be perceived, the composition is good. A bad composition would doubtless result if we placed the flower and vase together in front of a framed photograph, because the three things would not fuse together into a unity which contained more meaning than the things had separately. In fact, even the separate values would be lost, because the vase would obscure the photograph, which in turn would distract our attention from the vase. In other words, the arrangement would not help us to see much with ease.