Pictorial Beauty on the Screen

by Victor Oscar Freeburg

When the action takes place out of doors, or in an interior setting with considerable depth, the player is still more ignorant of what the composition looks like to the eye of the camera. Whether the movement of a particular person will harmonize with a swaying willow tree and with the shadows playing over the ground, can be discovered only by experiments viewed from the angle of the camera. And even then, after the action has been carefully planned through a succession of rehearsals, it may have to be varied during the actual “shooting.” A sudden change of wind or light or an unexpected movement of a dog or horse may bring in a new factor that must be instantly taken into account.

At the beginning and end of a scene the player should be especially pliable under the hands of the director, because the latter alone knows what the cinematic connection is to be with the preceding and following scenes. The lack of control in this pictorial continuity is often evident on the screen. Separate scenes become little dramas in themselves, and the whole photoplay is then really a succession of acts, with a structure always tending to fall apart, instead of cohering firmly into a unity. The peculiar difficulty in the movies is that the scenes are not taken in the same order as they are projected in the theater. On the screen the scenes shift more quickly than the actors could pass from one setting to the next, and yet the actual taking of those actions may have been weeks or even months apart. This is so because it is more economical to let the particular setting, and not the continuity of action, determine the grouping of the “shots.”

Thus, for example, the scenes numbered 9, 22, 25, 41, 98, and 133, with a drawing-room as setting, may all be taken on a single day, while numbers 8, 40, and 134, with a street as setting, may be taken some other day. And still another group of disconnected scenes may be taken a month later “on location” hundreds of miles away. This may be a fine system of efficiency for the manufacturer, but it often plays havoc with pictorial continuity. When an actress goes directly from scene 98 to 133, for example, she may be able to remember whether the latter scene is supposed to find her still single or already divorced, but she cannot be allowed to determine her own positions, pauses, tempo and general nature of movement, because that might spoil the transition from scene 132, which is not to be “shot” until several days later!

The farther we go into the study of the relation between the player and the rest of the motion picture, the more we realize that this relation can best be established and controlled by the director, and that the player is, in a sense, only a pigment with which the director paints.

“But what of the movie fans?” you ask. “Are they not more interested in the performer as a performer than in the play as a play, or in the picture as a picture?” Yes, the audience is undoubtedly “crazy about the star,” but that is largely because they have not been given anything else to be crazy about. It is true that we all admire the distinction of individual performers in any kind of entertainment; yet we would not approve of a football game, for example, in which the “star” half-back made so many brilliant plays that the rest of the eleven could not prevent the opposing team from piling up a winning score, or of a baseball game which was lost because the batter with a world’s record refused to make a “sacrifice hit.” And, besides, a distinguished actor or actress may remain distinguished even after having submitted to the directing of the master cinema composer, just as a figure in a painting may still be fascinating even though the painter has made it a thoroughly organic part of the whole composition.

Portrait of Charles I, a painting by Van Dyck. The composition is characterized by rhythm of tone and line, balance of design, and skilful subordination of interests. Many of the principles that underlie good painting may be successfully applied in a motion picture. See [page 80].

As the figure is really only a part of the motion picture so the setting is also only a part, and neither the setting nor the figure should be considered sufficient unto itself. One without the other is really incomplete; together they can be organized into a unified picture. This simple truth, always recognized by painters, has often been ignored, both by stage directors and motion picture directors. Perhaps the explanation is to be found in the materials with which the three different composers work. In a painting both the figure and the background are only paint, only representations side by side on a flat surface, and therefore easily admit of a perfect fusion of material. But in the case of stage drama the situation is different. The stage composition does not give us a similar natural blending of actor and background. The actor is a real human being, so near the spectators that some of them could touch him with their hands, while the background is merely an artificial representation of a room, a garden, or a cliff. The two elements of the stage picture refuse to mix, and the average spectator seems quite content to take them separately. In fact, it is not unusual for the audience to “give the scenery a hand” long before a single figure has entered to complete the composition.

Now the screen picture is entirely different from the stage picture, because on the screen everything we see is photographic representation, mere gradations of light and shadow, just as everything on the canvas of a painting is paint. In the motion picture without color the boundary line of a window or a table is described in exactly the same medium as the contour of an actor’s face; and the actor’s complexion differs from the wall paper only in being lighter or darker. It should be impossible, therefore, to consider that the photoplay setting is a complete, independent picture, and that the actors are separate visible things merely placed in front of the setting. And if the movie director makes the mistake of not fusing actor and setting into a pictorial composition, it is perhaps because he imagines the spectator with himself in the studio, where the scene and action are like those of the stage, instead of putting himself with the spectator before the screen.

But there are signs of awakening in the theater of the stage play. More and more the influence of such European masters as Max Reinhardt and Gordon Craig is being felt. According to their method of production the setting and the actors are interdependent and make a co-operative appeal to the eye of the audience. The young designers in the United States are beginning to think of the dramatic picture as a whole, rather than of the setting as a self-sufficient exhibition of their skill in painting. Mr. Lee Simonson, for example, not long ago, in commenting on his designs for the Theater Guild’s production of “The Faithful,” said that he purposely designed his sets so that they would seem top-heavy until the actors entered and filled in the comparatively empty zone near the bottom of the stage picture. Without the presence of the actor, he declared, one could never say that the set was good or bad; one could only say that it was incomplete. Such reasoning would do a great deal of good in the movie studios, from which a vast amount of silly publicity “dope” has come, announcing that this or that photoplay was highly artistic because such-and-such a well-known painter had been engaged to design the interior settings. One might as well say that a certain art student’s mural decoration was good because a famous master had begun the work by painting a background for the figures, or that a piece of music was beautiful because a master composer had written an accompaniment which somebody else had afterward combined with a melody.