Pictorial Beauty on the Screen

by Victor Oscar Freeburg

After a director has carefully composed a series of scenes so that the motions and patterns and textures and tones dissolve, from one moment to the next, in a rhythmical flow, regardless of how the story may have shifted its setting, we do not want some film doctor to come along and break that unity into pieces for the sake of a few jokes, or near-jokes, or for a few words of schoolroom wisdom or of sentimental gush. We object, not only to the content, the denotation of such “titles,” but also to their pictorial appearance.

That written words have pictorial appearance is a fact which most of us forgot as soon as we learned to read. We realize that Chinese characters or Egyptian hieroglyphics are pictorial, that they are drawings; but we forget that the characters and arrangements of our own writing and printing are also drawings. Judged as pictures the words on the screen are usually too severely white for the background. They fairly flash at you. Also the horizontal lines made by the tops and bottoms of the letters constitute a sort of grill-work which hardly ever blends pictorially with the pattern of the preceding or following scene.

As to the design of the letters themselves we find considerable variety on the screen, often with no direct reference to the meaning of the words or to the picture where they are inserted. Thus the tendency to introduce y’s and g’s with magnificent sweeping tails, or capital letters in fantastic curves, while revealing a commendable impulse to make writing pictorial, often leads to overemphasis, or to a direct conflict with other pictorial values in the film.[G]

[G] A neat pictorial touch in the titles of the German play, “The Golem,” is the suggestion of Hebrew script in the shaping of the letters.

Furthermore, the eye-movement over reading matter should be considered with reference to the eye-movement over the adjoining pictures. For example, after the title has been shown long enough to allow the normal reader to get to the end of the text, his eye may be at a point near the lower right corner or at the right side of the frame. Then if the following picture does not attract attention at this portion of the frame, a slight shock is caused by the necessary jump to a remote point of attention. A similar difficulty may arise in connecting a preceding picture with the beginning of the title.

Many directors have endeavored to make the title sections of a film more pictorial by introducing decorative drawings or paintings around the words, and even by introducing miniature motion pictures. Decorations in motion, however, are not to be recommended, because they distract attention from the words of the title, as has been illustrated in the discussion of “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” on page 46, and because they do not readily compose with those words to form a single picture. It is, in fact, as inartistic to “vision in” motion pictures on the background of a title as to “vision in” words on the background of a motion picture. In either case you really get two pictures within one frame.

Fixed decorations around a title may fill a pictorial need in unifying the portions of the film which have been cut apart by the insert. They may bridge the gap with a continuity of tone or line or shape, and may by their meaning preserve the dramatic mood of the photoplay. But here, too, caution must be observed lest the decorations draw attention away from the words or fail to compose well with the pictorial character of those words.

The problem of words on the screen does not seem very near a solution. There will doubtless be a great deal of juggling with titles before some magician comes who can “vanish” them completely from the fabric of a photoplay. Already photoplays such as “The Old Swimmin’ Hole,” directed by Joseph De Grasse and “The Journey’s End,” directed by Hugo Ballin, have been successfully produced without sub-titles. Some day, we hope, the wordless picture play will no longer be a novelty.

Another factor, which has already become troublesome, is the reproduction of color in the motion picture. If the director were a genuine colorist, and if he could produce the exact tint or shade of hue which the particular composition needs, and if this could be projected so that the spectator would really see what the director wanted him to see, then the conditions would be ideal for mastery in color movies. Such conditions may some day come, but they are not here now.

It is possible that the machinery of color photography will become so perfect that the spectator may be able to see on the screen the exact color values which were found in the subject photographed. But that will be only a triumph of science. It will be a scientific achievement of the same kind as the correct reproduction of colors in a lithograph or color-gravure of a painting. But art lies in the production and arrangement, not in the reproduction, of colors.