Pictorial Beauty on the Screen

by Victor Oscar Freeburg

As a form of art the dance has been preserved through the ages in an apparently unbroken history. And it has had various off-shoots besides; for religious and secular processions, pantomime, and even drama, have had their beginnings in the dance. Pictorial motion was to be seen two thousand years ago in the Roman triumphs and processions, whose gaudiest features survive in the familiar circus parade of today. And the circus itself is in a sense the pictorial motion of animals and men.

In the presentation of drama, too, pictorial motion has always played a vital part. When we look back over the history of the theater we see that the managers were never satisfied with the mere physical exhibition of actors and dancers, but began very early to add other motions to their performance. A large variety of motions was added by bringing animals upon the scenes. Fire was put into the service of show. We know that its flame and flicker, borne in torches or beating upon the witches’ caldron, was not uncommon on Shakespeare’s stage. Water in the form of leaping cascades and playing fountains was used at least two hundred years ago to make the scene more pictorial. More recently, wind has been produced artificially in order to give motion to draperies, flags, or foliage.

All this amounts to something far more than an attempt to bring nature upon the stage. It is the creation of new beauty. The kind of beauty which professional entertainers have for thousands of years spun together from various motions into patterns simple or subtle, is the beauty of art, for it comes from human personality expressing itself in forms and combinations never found as such in nature.

Now, if these showmen are really artists, at least in intent, we may well ask how they have combined their motions so as to produce the pleasing effects which they desired. Have they worked hit-or-miss and achieved beauty only by accident, or have they intentionally or instinctively obeyed certain laws of the human eye and mind?

How does the director of a motion picture make sure that pleasing motion will appear upon the screen? Does he alter, or select, his subjects? Does he choose his point of view? Does he patiently wait for the right moment? Or must beauty come by accident, as music might come from a cat’s running over the keyboard of a piano?

There must be laws of pictorial motion, just as there are laws of color, design, modelling, architectural construction, all of which appeal to the eye without visible motion. And, since the motion picture can capture and combine and reproduce a greater variety of moving things than was ever before possible in the history of art, it seems particularly important that we make earnest efforts to find out under what laws these manifold motions may be organized into art.

In studying the movies one might easily come to the conclusion that some directors aim only to make motions life-like. Their whole creed seems to be that a heart-broken woman should move her shoulders and chest as though she really were heart-broken, that a goat should act exactly like a goat, and that a windmill should behave itself exactly like a windmill. Now, it may be very desirable, as far as it goes, that an emotion be “registered” fitly. But to aim at fitting expression alone is to aim at naturalness alone. And this is not enough, because there may be natural ugliness, and because even the beauty of nature is essentially different from the beauty of art.

Shakespeare’s plays are not admired simply because they reveal human character truthfully. Rembrandt’s paintings are not preserved in museums merely because they are truthful representations of Dutchmen. The Venus of Milo would not have a room to herself in the Louvre if the statue were nothing more than a life-like figure of a woman partly dressed. In drama, poetry, fiction, painting, sculpture, and music, it has never been considered that appropriateness, naturalness, or truthfulness was in itself sufficient to distinguish the work as art. And it surely cannot be so in the movies.

It certainly has not been so in the earlier arts of motion. The dance as a form of expression is beautiful, but it is so far from natural that if the average voter started out to express his joy or grief, or love or defiance, the way a dancer does on the stage, he would be given a free ride to the psychopathic ward. The stage pantomime is charming, but if you behaved in the presence of your true love the way Pierrot and Columbine behave, he or she, as the case may be, would probably decide that you were too much of a clown ever to become a responsible parent. The circus, too, though not properly to be classed as a form of art, combines and presents a vast number of interesting motions which you never expect to see outside the big tent. Dancers, pantomime actors, circus masters and performers, all clearly strive to collect our money by showing us the kind of motions which nature herself does not show.

But do not become alarmed. We do not propose to establish a school of unnatural acting in the movies. Let the women and men and greyhounds and weeping willows and brooks be as natural as they can be, like themselves and not like each other. Natural, yes, providing they be not natural in an ugly way. If a brook is running in one direction as naturally as it can, and a greyhound is running in the opposite direction as naturally as he can, the combination of their contrary movements may not be pleasing in a motion picture. Art is art, not because it reflects some actual bit of nature, but because it is endowed with some beauty made by man.