Pictorial Beauty on the Screen

by Victor Oscar Freeburg

“Now, look here,” cuts in some old-time producer, “you don’t mean to say that you want our actors to dance through a drama, do you—a murder scene, or a wedding, or a meeting of profiteers to raise the price of soap?” No, indeed, we do not. In fact, we are hardly thinking of them as actors at all—not in this chapter. We are merely thinking of them as moving shapes upon a screen. And we want those shapes to move about in such a way that the motions will not hurt our eyes.

If we study those films that please us most we shall discover easy continuity of movement, so that a path of motion described in any one scene is extended, as it were, into a similar path of motion in the following scene. In such motion pictures there may be shifts, but there are no breaks. Paths of motion on the screen can remain long in our memories, as though they were fixed lines in a picture. Clearly, therefore, it would not be pleasing to have these remembered lines of motion clashing with those which are being perceived.

From Audrey. Cover up the left half of this picture and the lower half of the remaining part, and the quarter which then remains will contain a more pleasing and dramatic composition than that of the view taken as a whole. See [pages 53] and [71].

So much for the optical effects of single motions coming in succession. Now we must advance to the consideration of several motions going on in various directions during the same moment, which is a more usual situation in the photoplay. Several motions at once may constitute a harmony or a jumble, according to the first demands which they make upon the eye-work and brain-work of vision.

The difference between visual harmony and disharmony seems to depend partly on the fact that a pair of human eyes work together as one, and not as two separate instruments. You cannot look up with one eye and down with the other; you cannot look to the left with one eye and to the right with the other; you cannot look at a distant object with one eye and at a near one with the other. Hence, if you try to look intently at two or more objects crossing each other in opposite directions, your eyes are baffled and the effect is not pleasurable. There is also a conflict in our mental work of seeing, when opposing motions try to claim equal attention at the same time, unless, as we have previously stated, these motions are in some kind of rhythmical balance with each other.

Because of this baffling of eye and brain, therefore, we are displeased by the sight of two automobiles passing each other in opposite directions, or by the crossing of an actor’s gestures with the spoke of a wheel or the twig of a tree. A particularly ugly crossing is that of false and real motion, which even some of the best directors still indulge in. False, or apparent, motion occurs when the camera itself has been moving about while the picture was being taken. Thus a road is made to shoot upwards over the screen while our hero is riding madly toward us, or a parlor slides drunkenly to one side while some fair lady marches toward a door, or a stairway becomes a waterfall which she swims upstairs. The real motion, of course, contains the dramatic interest, but the false motion forces itself upon us by its novelty or unexpectedness; it becomes difficult for us to see much with ease, and the result is ugliness.

A particularly annoying device of recent vogue is the sub-title insert which is decorated with symbolical motions. It forces the spectator to read words and look at motions at the same time and upon the same spot of the screen. The Metro interpretation of the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” beautiful in its photographed scenes, was spoiled by much ugliness of that kind. In one sub-title we must look at the Beast snorting and chopping his long jaws, while several lines of type are spread over his horrible movements. In others we see water flowing from the bottom of the screen toward the top, or we see a pin-wheel of sparks, to represent telegraphic messages going around the world, or we see a squirrel in his wheel-cage, to represent something or other, and in each of these cases we must also read words in glaring type blazed on top of the moving symbols.

Oppositions and conflicts baffle and bewilder the eye and mind, but concurrent co-operating motions please them. It is easy, for example, to look at the shower of fire from a sky rocket, because the lines move in similar directions and remain comparatively near together, each one, as it were, helping the others, so that what we see in one part of the motion is a key to the rest of the motion. There is a similar unity and rhythmical balance in the motion of a flock of birds, a school of fish, or a group of dancers, the billows of the sea, or the feathery fall of snowflakes.

The production of harmonious motions in a photoplay might seem to us spectators to be merely a matter of spying with a camera and catching views of harmonious actions and settings. But the problem is not so simple. For the movements within any given scene may be perfectly orchestrated with respect to each other, and yet may clash with every one of the movements in the following scene. If in one picture our eyes and minds have adjusted themselves to the delicate threading of snow-flakes, falling like a softly changing tapestry, they can only be shocked by a sudden jump to the vigorous curling of a sea wave breaking on the beach. And in our natural desire to appreciate both subjects at once we are disappointed to find that each has spoiled the other. Delicacy looks at power and thinks it violence; power looks at delicacy and thinks it weakness. It is a visual effect such as one would get from a drawing where the hair lines of the finest pen and thinnest ink were crossed by the coarse marks of a blunt piece of charcoal.