Let us speculate for a moment on what would happen to this composition if we remove the diagonal poles, chains, etc., and turn the swing into a seat. The figures, even as they stand, would then form a not unpleasing rhythm, and the line of heads, with expressions helping to give direction, would lead to the heroine.
This “still” illustrates misplaced emphasis and several other defects in pictorial composition which characterized the general run of movies a few years ago. See [page 54].
A specimen of bad composition, from an old film. The window is emphasized by its curious shape, by its central position, by its strong contrasts of black and white, and by the woman’s gesture; yet this window has no dramatic significance whatsoever in the scene. See [page 55].
A glaring example of wrong emphasis caused by the attraction of a right-angled shape is to be seen in a “still” from “Other Men’s Wives,” on opposite page, where the window, toward which the woman unconsciously points her wand, irresistibly attracts the attention of the spectator. Is it not evident from even a cursory analysis of these “stills” that, though the directors may have given some thought to the poses and groupings of the performers, they have failed to realize that every other visible thing within scope of the camera must also be harmonized with the figures in order to keep the dramatic emphasis where it belongs?
Keeping in mind what we have just said about the visual accents of right angles we turn to a “still” from the “Spell of the Yukon,” facing [page 28]. The window catches our eyes before anything else in the picture, both because of its square corners and because of its sharp contrasts of black and white. Though this distraction may be only for a brief moment, it is enough to keep our attention for that moment away from the man and boy, set in fine atmosphere.
It is only common sense to aim at making the visual interest of a picture coincide with the dramatic interest. And this can be done by controlling such means of attraction as we have just mentioned. When we look at the painting entitled “The Shepherdess,” facing [page 21], our glance falls immediately upon the shepherdess, because the almost vertical line of her body forms a cross with the horizontal line of the sheep’s backs. Yet the design is so subtle that, unless we stop to analyze, we do not notice how the painter achieves his emphasis. We do not notice that the front of the woman’s body is really a continuation of the left edge of a tree which extends to the top of the frame, that her profile is the continuation of a line of foliage from another tree, that her staff makes right angles with her throat and with the back of her head, that the rhythmical contours of a sheep flow into her left hand and arm, and that a shadow from the lower center of the picture leads to her feet.
If a painter establishes his emphasis so carefully in a picture which the beholder may regard for hours at a time, it would seem all the more urgent for a cinema composer to study out the correct emphasis for a pictorial moment which the spectator must grasp in only a second or two. It is extremely important, for the simple reason that, if the director does not deliberately draw the attention of the spectator to the dramatic interest in the picture, it is most likely that accident will emphasize some other part, as we have seen in the examples already discussed; and then, before the spectator has time to reason himself away from the false emphasis to the true interest, the action will go on to some other scene, and a part of the real message will be lost.
