Movement, movement through rich variety, movement accomplished with the utmost ease—that is the essence of what we have chosen to call the play of pictorial motions. That play, as we have seen in the illustrations given, involves every kind of pictorial motion, whether of spot, or line, or pattern, or texture, or tone; and every property or phase, whether of direction, or rate, or duration; and every circumstance, whether in relation to other motions near or remote, simultaneous, or successive, or in relation to fixed elements of the picture. Any two or three of these things may be treated as a separate problem, but it is in the orchestration of all of them together that the director may achieve the dominant, distinctive rhythm of his photoplay. If he does not aspire to such achievement he is unworthy of his profession. If he evades his problems because they are difficult he is robbing his trust. If he declares that the world that loves movies does not crave beauty on the screen, he is bearing false witness. If he believes that the beauty of a photoplay lies wholly in the emotional appeal of the performer and in the dramatic action of the plot, he is stone blind to art.
So far as the motions in a picture present the actions and reactions of the dramatic characters clearly and emphatically, they do faithful work; but this work becomes play when it is relieved of its hardness and dullness, and is animated with a spontaneity and variety that catches up the spectator into a swinging movement of attention. And those motions which are both work and play are basic in the beauty of cinematic art.
CHAPTER IX
PICTORIAL MOTIONS AT REST
That a moving thing may sometimes seem to be at rest is well known by any one who has ever spun a top. The top spins itself to sleep. We gaze upon it in a peculiar spell of restfulness, which is broken only when the top wakes up and begins to wabble.
Now one trouble with the movies is that they often wabble when they ought to spin. The motions in the picture too often lack a center of balance, a point of rest. All of us have been annoyed by excessive motions, jumbling, clashing, on the screen. But many of us have also, in lucky moments, been delighted by sudden harmonies on the screen, when the pictorial motions, without slowing up in the least, were conjured into a strange vital repose. And afterward, when we recalled the enthrallment of such moments, we became optimists about the future of cinema art.
Surely this is one of the characteristic appealing things about a motion picture, that it can show us motions doing the work of pictorial expression, indulging in rhythmic play, and yet suggesting a dynamic repose. Thus the youngest art can give us in a new way that “stimulation and repose” which, psychologists say, is the function of all arts. The painter who can suggest movement by means of fixed lines, masses, and colors is no more of a magician than the cinema composer who can make moving things suggest rest.
Let me propose the following as working theories to explain the effect of reposefulness in organized pictorial motions: First, that the separate motions are balanced against each other; Second, that the significant motions are kept near to a center of rest within the frame of the picture, are sometimes even limited to an exceedingly small area of the screen; and, Third, that every significant motion is harmonized in kind, direction, and tempo with everything else in the picture.
The balancing of pictorial motions does not imply that they must be paired off in exact equals. Certainly we do not insist that a dramatic scene be so composed that when, for example, a person rises from a chair in one part of a room, some other person sits down in a chair in the opposite part of the room. Such an effect would be highly mechanical, like the teetering of a see-saw; and it is not possible for a spectator to get a thrill of beauty while his attention is being held down to mechanics. We mean rather to apply the same reasoning to pictorial motions which we have in Chapter V applied to fixed lines, shapes, and tones. In short, we want to see the values of pictorial motions so well distributed over the screen, and so related to each other, that they give the impression of being in perfect equilibrium.
Suppose we imagine a cinema scene which contains a waterfall in the left half, and nothing in the right half except a dark, uninteresting side of a cliff. That composition would be out of balance. And if a band of Indians entered the scene from the left and did a war dance directly in front of the waterfall, that would throw the composition still more out of balance. Or if, at the opening of the scene, the Indians appeared dancing in front of the bare cliff, and then gradually moved over to a place in front of the waterfall, this cluttering of motions would certainly unbalance the picture.