Pictorial Beauty on the Screen

by Victor Oscar Freeburg

It would be easy for the director, of course, if the story which he is about to film always called for action as graceful as that of a dance. But unfortunately his scenario often demands the connecting of actions which, pictorially considered, are totally unrelated to each other. Yet if the director cares to seek the principles of beauty he will find many ways of harmonizing elements that are seemingly in conflict.

One way is simply to impose on each of the discordant elements a new value which they may assume in common without losing their own distinctive characters. Suppose, for instance, that we must show a society lady, with all her soft refinement, on a visit to a foundry, with all its sweating roughness. One may fear that there must be something repellent between her stately gentility and the bending backs of workmen; between her kid-gloved gestures and the flow of molten metal. Yet we can blend the whole scene into a single rhythm by suffusing all its elements with the warm glow of the furnace and by playing over them all the same movement of quivering light and shadow. This vibrant, welding beauty which lady and laborer and machine may have in common, while still retaining their individual dramatic significance, will thus give the touch of art to a motion picture which might otherwise be merely a crude photographic record of an incident in a story.

Another way of bringing two conflicting motions into a rhythmical relation is to place between them a third motion which, by being somewhat like either of the other two, bridges the gap and thus transforms a sense of fixed opposition into a sense of moving variety. It would be somewhat of a shock, for instance, to shift our view instantly from the rippling flow of a narrow stream to the wheels and levers of a mill. But there would undoubtedly be a sense of continuity, and perhaps of rhythm, in shifting from a general view of the stream to a view of the water-wheel over which it flows, and thence to the wheels of the machinery inside the mill.

This method of interposing a harmonizer might be useful also in carrying over the rhythm of motion into the rhythm of fixed forms. Thus if we were to throw upon the screen a picture of the gently rolling sea, sharply followed by a view of the sweeping horizon of the hills, it is most probable that the two kinds of rhythm would not unite to draw a single emotional response from the spectator. He would feel only the contrast. But if the view of the sea were followed by a view of a field of grain, whose wind-driven billows resembled the waves of the sea and whose rolling ground resembled the sweep of the hills, then the rhythm of the quiet hills themselves might easily seem to be one with the rhythm of the restless sea.

As we study the subject of visual rhythm we are led to compare it again and again with auditive rhythm, which is best exemplified in music. Thus it is easy to see how a given motion in a picture might be considered the melody while all the other motions serve as accompaniment, and how characteristic motions might be played against each other like counterpoint in music. It is easy to see how a whole succession of scenes might be considered a single rhythmical totality, like a “movement” in a musical composition. And it is certain that any director who thought of cinema composition in that sense would never permit the slovenly joining which is so familiar in photoplays. He would not then allow the shift from one scene to another to be essentially a clash of unrelated motions. He would assure himself rather that the characteristic types of motion in one scene, their directions, velocities, and patterns, played into corresponding factors of the next scene, until the entire succession became a symphony of motion.[D]

[D] For a further comparison between music and pictorial motions see Chapter IV of “The Art of Photoplay Making.”

It is an interesting fact that movement in a photoplay may come from other things besides motions. One would get a sense of movement, for example, even if every scene in a photoplay were itself a fixed picture held for a few seconds on the screen. The various durations of these pictures might be in a rhythmical series. The same might be said of their dominant tones, and of their characteristic patterns and textures. Would the time-lengths 3, 4, 2, 7, 5, be a good succession? Or would 3, 7, 4, 5, 2 be better? Which would make a better succession of figures? A circle, a triangle, and a cross? Or a cross, a square, and a circle? Questions like these are not trivial; neither are they over-refined. They and their answers should appear in the catechism of every cinema composer.

Speaking of durations of scenes reminds us that in music it is often the silences between the notes which vary in length while the notes themselves are uniform. This would be true in the case of a simple melody played on the piano. The intervals between notes can be observed by tapping out the “time” of the piece on a single key of the piano, or on a tin pan, for that matter; and the rhythm of time thus represented would alone enable a listener to identify any popular piece of music.

At present there are no rests on the screen, no blank periods between the scenes. There are, to be sure, moments of relaxation when scenes are being “faded out,” and these “fades,” like the dying away of musical sounds, have genuine rhythmical movement. But there is not on the screen any alternation between stimulus and non-stimulus, as there is in music, and as there is also in the performance of a stage play. The motion picture, therefore, lacks that source of rhythm which exists in musical rests or in the dramatic pauses of stage dialogue.

Whether intervals of non-stimulus could be successfully introduced on the screen can be learned only by experiment. Any director who is really in earnest about developing the motion picture as art should make such an experiment. If he investigates the results of scientific tests in psychological laboratories he will learn that under certain conditions the normal spectator unconsciously creates rhythm in what he sees. It has been shown, for example, that a person looking at a small light which is flashed on and off at intervals has a tendency to make rhythmic groupings of those flashes, by overestimating or underestimating the lengths of the intervals. In other words, if you give the beholder’s imagination a chance to function, it will indulge in rhythmic play. We believe that if a cinema composer could thus produce rhythm by illusion, as well as by actual presentation, his achievement would be epoch-making in the movies.