Pictorial Beauty on the Screen

by Victor Oscar Freeburg

Pictorial efficiency cannot be bought. It cannot be guaranteed by the possession of expensive cameras and other mechanical equipment. The camera has no sense, no soul, no capacity for selecting, emphasizing, and interpreting the pictorial subject for the benefit of the spectator. In fact, the camera is positively stupid, because it always shows more than is necessary; it often emphasizes the wrong thing, and it is notoriously blind to beautiful significance. You who carry kodaks for the purpose of getting souvenirs of your travels have perhaps often been surprised, when the films were developed, to discover some very conspicuous object, ugly and jarring, which you had not noticed at the time when the picture was taken. At that time your mind had forced your eye to ignore all that was not interesting and beautiful, but the camera had made no such choice.

From The Plough Girl. The pictorial composition at this moment of the action is bad because the spectator’s eye is not led instantly to the book, which is the most important dramatic interest in this scene. See [page 11].

It will not help matters to buy a better lens for your camera and to be more careful of the focus next time. Such things can only make the images more sharp; they cannot alter the emphasis. Unfortunately there are still movie makers, and movie “fans,” too, in the world who have the notion that sharpness of photography, or “clearness,” as they call it, is a wonderful quality. But such people do not appreciate art; they merely appreciate machinery. To make the separate parts of a picture more distinct does not help us to see the total meaning more clearly. It may, in fact, prevent us from seeing.

Let us look, for example, at the “still” reproduced on the opposite page. The picture is clear enough. We observe that it contains three figures and about a dozen objects. Our attention is caught by a conspicuous lamp, whose light falls upon a suspicious-looking jug, with its stopper not too tightly in. Yet these objects, emphasized as they are, have but slight importance indeed when compared with the book clutched in the man’s hand.

This mistake in emphasis is not the fault of the camera; it is the fault of the director, who in the haste, or ignorance, perhaps, of days gone by, composed the picture so badly that the spectators are forced to look first at the wrong things, thus wasting time and energy before they can find the right things. On the screen, to be sure, the book attracts some attention because it is in motion, yet that does not suffice to draw our attention immediately away from the striking objects in the foreground. The primary interests should, of course, have been placed in the strongest light and in the most prominent position.

Guiding the attention of the spectator properly helps him to understand what he is looking at, but it is still more important to help him feel what he is looking at. Movie producers used to have a great deal to say about the need of putting “punch” into a picture, of making it so strong that it would “hit the audience between the eyes.” Well, let those hot injunctions still be given. We maintain that good composition will make any motion picture “punch” harder, and that bad composition will weaken the “punch,” may, indeed, prevent its being felt at all. But before arguing that proposition, let us philosophize a bit over the manner in which a “punch” operates on our minds.

Anything that impresses the human mind through the eye requires a three-fold expenditure of human energy. There is, first, the physical exertion of looking, then the mental exertion of seeing, that is, understanding what one looks at, and, finally, the joy of feeling, the pouring out of emotional energy. This last is the “punch,” the result which every artist aims to produce; but it can only be achieved through the spectator’s enjoyment of looking and seeing.

Now, since the total human energy available at any one time for looking, seeing, and feeling is limited, it is clearly desirable to economize in the efforts of looking and seeing, in order to leave so much the more energy for emotional enjoyment. We shall discuss in the following chapter some of the things which waste our energies during the efforts of looking and seeing. Let us here consider how pictorial composition can control the expenditure of emotional energy, and how it may thus either help or hinder the spectator in his appreciation of beauty on the screen.

Let us imagine an example of a typical “punch” picture and describe it here in words—inadequate though they may be—to illustrate how a bad arrangement of events and scenes may use up the spectator’s emotional energy before the story arrives at the event intended to furnish the main thrill. The “punch” in this case is to be the transfer of a man from one airplane to another. But many other things will disturb us on the way, and certain striking scenes will rob the aerial transfer of its intended “punch.”