Pictorial Beauty on the Screen

by Victor Oscar Freeburg

It would be most desirable if unity of motion could be sustained throughout the entire length of a photoplay, as in a stage play or in a musical composition. There should be a real continuity of pictures, as there is supposed to be “continuity” of actions described in a scenario. But such continuity is hard to find on the screen. In “The Love Light,” for instance, the film which we have just discussed, there is little unity of motion except in the climactic scenes. The very action from which the title “The Love Light” is derived, is botched in composition. The light is that of a lighthouse and the heroine manipulates it so as to throw a signal to her lover. This action is shown in a series of cut-backs from a close-up of a girl in the lighthouse to a general view of the sea below and to a close-up of the hero. But the lantern with its apparatus of prisms makes a cylindrical pattern which does not harmonize in shape with the long white pencil of the searchlight sweeping the sea. Nor does it harmonize in motion, for the simple reason that the sweeping ray moves clock-wise, in spite of the fact that the girl rotates the lantern counter-clock-wise.

Two other discrepancies in these scenes may be noted. One is that in the close-ups the lantern does not appear to be lighted, and the other is that lighthouses do not, as a rule, send out light in pencil-like shape.

The scene above cited lacks pictorial unity, in spite of the fact that the neighboring scenes are in perfect unity of dramatic meaning. This illustrates the dangerous difference between saying things in words and saying them in pictures. If we write, for example, “she swings the lantern around slowly, etc.,” no reader is likely to question whether the lantern is lighted or not, or whether it is rotated in one direction or the opposite. But the camera impolitely tells the whole truth. And some truths are full of fight when they are brought face to face with each other.

The suddenness with which one scene leaps to the next on the screen is a factor which many directors and most scenario writers fail to reckon with. In Chapter III we have discussed at some length the effect which these sudden jumps have upon our eyes. It remains now to see how the “flash” from one scene to another affects our minds. In “Barbary Sheep,” directed by Maurice Tourneur, there is bad joining which may be illustrated by naming a succession of three scenes. They are: (1) A picture of a mountain sheep some distance away on the edge of a cliff, sharp against the sky, an excellent target for a hunter. (2) The hero out hunting. He sees something, aims his gun obliquely upward. Our eyes follow the line of the gun toward the upper left-hand corner of the frame. (3) Some society ladies in a room.

Perhaps the reader can guess, even from this incomplete description in words, how sudden and complete was the shock of scene 3 coming after the preparation of scene 2. There was a complete violation of unity of meanings, as well as of motions. We cannot say who was to blame for this bad art, whether it was the director, or some one in the “cutting room.” Possibly some motion picture operator had mutilated the film in the theater. The fact remains that this part of the picture as it reached the audience was badly composed. The promise of one scene was not only ignored but ridiculed in the next scene.

An excellent illustration of how the promise made by a scene can be beautifully fulfilled for the eye by a following scene may be found in Griffith’s “The Idol Dancer.” Incidentally the joining shows how false motion may be harmonized with real motion. Let the reader imagine himself looking at a motion picture screen. The setting is a New England country road in winter. Into the picture from the lower right side of the frame comes a one-horse sleigh, which, as it glides along the road, describes a curving motion over the screen, first to the left and then upward to the right. It then begins curving to the left again, when the scene is suddenly cut. The effect on our eyes at this moment is such that we expect a continuation of motion toward the left, a completion of the swing. And this is just what we get in the next picture, which shows, not the sleigh at all, but the motion of the landscape gliding by, from right to left, as the sleigh-riders themselves might have seen it. We feel a pleasure of the eye somewhat akin to the pleasure of our ears when a musician strikes a note which the melody has led us to expect. Griffith’s touch of art in this joining is especially delightful because it is so subtle that any spectator, though he would surely feel it, would not observe it unless he were especially occupied in the analysis of motion on the screen.

Sometimes two scenes may be joined in perfect harmony of motions and yet show a conflict of meanings. In “The Love Light,” above mentioned, we have one scene where the hero is about to take refuge in the cellar beneath the room occupied by the heroine. He raises a trap door, goes down the steps, and, as he descends slowly, closes the door behind him. This downward-swinging motion of the door is in our eyes when the scene is cut, and the next instant we see the outer door of the house swinging open suddenly as the heroine rushes out into the yard. The motions of the two doors are in perfect unity and balance, but we are shocked nevertheless, because, since our minds and eyes were on the hero in the cellar, we had expected another view of him beneath the trap door.

But there are worse compositions than this in the movie theaters. Sometimes whole plays are out of unity from beginning to end. A notorious example was a photoplay called “The Birth of a Race,” which began with Adam and Eve and ended up with visions of the future, touching as it ran such things as little Moses and the Daughter of Pharaoh, the slave drivers of Egypt, the exodus of Israel, the crucifixion of Christ, the three ships of Columbus, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, the World War, German spies, steel works in the United States, a strike of the workers, etc., etc. All of these scenes were badly joined, but the greatest shock of all came when the action jumped in a flash from Christ and the two thieves writhing in crucifixion to the three ships of Columbus heeling gracefully in a light breeze.

Merely to hint at the contents of such a play is, we hope, sufficient criticism. Without harmony of subject matter there certainly can be no harmony of treatment. And if the director of “The Birth of a Race” offers as his defense that he did not write the story, we can only retort that he should not have picturized it. Even when the subject matter is in continuous unity it requires a skillful, painstaking, sincere director to weave its various materials into a single harmony of impressiveness.

Perhaps we have continued long enough the discussion of the many-sided nature and the artistic value of pictorial motions at rest. Let us simply add that the kind of rest we have in mind is never the rest of inaction, of sleep, or of death; it is rather a dynamic repose. Just as the still portions of the motion picture may be active upon the spectator’s mind, so the motions may be reposeful while they are both at work and at play. Such harmony of pictorial motions on the screen is not too high an ideal for the lovers of the cinema. The glimpses we get of that ideal now are enough to assure us that as time goes on more and more directors will be filled with inspiration and will achieve triumphant expression through their chosen art.