Pictorial Beauty on the Screen

by Victor Oscar Freeburg

On the other hand, to place the flower and vase against some hanging or panel which harmonizes with them in color and emphasizes the beauty of the flower, is good composition, providing the rest of the environment is in harmony. The vase must, of course, stand on something, perhaps a table or a mantel-piece. This support must have shape, lines, color and texture, all visual elements which must be skillfully wrought into our design if the composition is to be successful. We see, therefore, that the artistic arrangement of simple things which do not move, which stay where you put them, is by no means a simple matter.

What we have just described may be called composition in a general sense, but it represents only the initial process in pictorial composition. The picture maker’s work only begins with the arranging of the subject. It does not end until he has recorded that subject in some permanent form, such as a painting, a drawing, or a celluloid negative. In the recording, or treatment, the painter tries to improve the composition of his subject. He changes the curves of the vase and the flower somewhat in order to obtain a more definite unity. He softens the emphasis in one place and heightens it in another. He balances shape against shape. He swings into the picture a rhythm of line and tone which he hopes may express to some beholder the harmony which he, the artist, feels. In other words, the painter begins by arranging things, he continues by altering the aspects of those things until they fit his conception of the perfect picture of the subject before him, and he finishes the composition only when he leaves a permanent record of what he has seen and felt.

The Shepherdess, a painting by LeRolle, illustrating several principles of design which can be effectively used in photoplays. See [page 55].

Now it is evident that the painter might begin, without an actual flower or vase or panel or table, by merely arranging his mental images of those things. But the process would, of course, still be composition. If, for example, he were to say to himself “To-morrow I shall paint a picture of a rose in a slate-blue vase standing on an antique oak table backed by a gray panel,” that very arrangement of images in his mind would be the first phase of his composition. Or if a customer were to come to him and say “To-morrow I want you to paint for me a picture of a rose,” etc., the process of bringing things together would still be composition; only in that case it begins with the customer and is completed by the painter.

If we apply this reasoning to the movies it is clear that as soon as a scenario writer writes a single line saying that a hydro-airplane takes off from the sea, he has already started a pictorial composition. Although he may not realize it, he has already brought together the long straight line of the horizon, the short curving lines of the waves, and the short straight and oblique lines of the plane. He has already made it necessary to combine certain tonal values of airplane and sky and sea, though he may not have stopped to consider what those tonal values might be.

But the writer does other things of greater consequence than the combining of shapes and tonal values. He prescribes motions and locomotions of things, and he orders the succession of scenes. Even if he writes only that “a plane rises from the sea,” he makes necessary the combination of a great number of movements. On the screen that plane will have at least four movements, namely, rising, tilting, going toward the right or the left, and the movement of diminishing size. And the sea will have at least three movements, namely, undulation, flowing, and the movement of the wake. Now if the scenario writer adds something else to the same scene, or prescribes the mutual relation of things and movements which are to appear in the next scene, he is, of course, merely continuing the process of cinema composition.

Insofar as the writer makes the combination of these things essential to the story he circumscribes the power, he may even tie the hands, of the director. For the latter, unless he ignores the composition thus begun, can do only one thing with it; he can only carry it on.

Now it is a sad thing to relate that many scenario writers do not suspect the truth of what we have just said. Some of them are evidently unaware of the significant fact that their description is really a prescription, that even by their written words they are really drawing the first lines of hundreds of pictures, that they are actually engaged in pictorial composition. They may be without knowledge of graphic art and without skill. They may not be able to take a pencil or a piece of charcoal and sketch out a horse or a hut or the general aspect of a single pictorial moment as it would appear on the screen. They may never have given any thought to the question of how best to arrange simultaneous or successive movements in order to give the strongest emotional appeal to the spectator. Yet they are drawing screen pictures, and drawing them on the typewriter!

Of course, even the most intelligent scenario writers, even those who have the most accurate knowledge of pictorial values on the screen and the keenest power of visualizing their story as it will appear after it has been screened, are always handicapped by working in the medium of language. Words are not motion-photographs, any more than they are paint or marble. This is the scenario writer’s handicap. But, though we may sympathize with him because of the handicap, we cannot relieve him of responsibility as the designer of beginnings in the cinema composition.