The director has a handicap, too. He also does not work in the medium of motion photographs. He cannot do so. Even if he were to look through the view-finder of the motion picture camera during the entire taking of every scene, he would not see exactly what we are destined to see in the theater. He would see things only in miniature, in a glass some two inches square, instead of larger than life. He would see things, not in black and white, but in their true colors. And he can never, under any circumstance, behold two or more scenes directly connected, with no more than the wink of an eye between them, until after the negatives have been developed, positives printed, and the strips spliced together in the cutting and joining room.
In other words, neither the scenario writer nor the motion picture director can ever know definitely in advance just what the finished work will look like to us in the theater. If we are aware of these handicaps, it may help us to understand why ugliness so often slips through to the screen, but it will not permit us to tolerate that ugliness. We, as spectators and critics, must forever insist that the photoplay makers master their art, no matter how difficult the mastery may be.
It was held some years ago that the only thing the matter with the movies was that the stories were badly composed and of little originality. Hence, a number of prominent novelists and playwrights were hired to adapt their own literary work or prepare new stories for the screen. But these literary men were among the first to discover that better writing does not in itself guarantee better pictures. It is the director who is more truly the picture maker than any one of his collaborators in the work. Ideally, he should prepare his own scenario, just as the painter makes his own preliminary sketches, and the fiction writer makes his own first draught of a story. Ideally, too, the plot should be devised by the director (who might then truly be called a cinema composer), devised especially for motion pictures, and with peculiar qualities and appeals that could never so well be expressed in other mediums.
But that is an ideal to be dreamed of. And, meanwhile, we “movie fans” can enjoy the best that is being produced by collaborative methods, and we can help toward the achievement of still better things by developing a thorough appreciation of what is pictorially pleasing, at the same time that we train ourselves to detect and talk out of existence the common faults of the movies.
CHAPTER III
EYE TESTS FOR BEAUTY
Do the movies hurt your eyes? Some say “yes” and some say “no.” Why is it that photoplay scenes sometimes flash and dazzle, but have neither radiance nor sparkle? Why is it that the motions sometimes shown on the screen get “on your nerves”? Why is it that you look at so much on the screen and remember so little? These questions can be answered by making certain eye tests for beauty, and, having answered them, we may proceed to a detailed discussion of pictorial composition in a great variety of cases.
In order to understand how the pleasure of pictorial beauty comes to a spectator, we must analyze the processes of looking and seeing. These processes consist partly of eye-work and partly of brain-work. That is, the physical eye must do certain work before the brain gets the visual image. Now if the physical eye has to work too hard, or bear a sudden strain, or undergo excessive wear, it will not function well; and, consequently, the brain will have to work harder in order to grasp the picture. All this causes displeasure, and displeasure is in conflict with beauty.
Let us state, once for all, that motion pictures need never hurt the eyes—quite the contrary. Yet we have often seen photoplays that did hurt the eyes. Some of the reasons for this will be given in the following paragraphs.
A familiar operation of the physical eye is the contraction and dilation of the pupil. We know from childhood that the pupil grows large when the light is weak, and small when the light is strong. We also know that the eye cannot make this adjustment instantly. If a strong light is suddenly flashed on us, for example, when we lie awake in a dark room it dazzles us, because our pupils are adjusted for darkness; it even hurts so much that we defend ourselves by closing the eyelids.