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16 CINEMATOGRAPHIC ANNUAL
capital could be expended in prodigal sums with the assurance that the investment would be safe and yield generous returns.
Numerous critics of the methods of making motion pictures have deplored the waste which they saw or felt existed. They were quite sure that motion pictures could be made efficiently and without delays, loss of time or money. Sausages and automobiles were made that way, why not pictures?
Alas! These critics were somewhat superficial in their analyses. They did not delve deeply enough into the matter. Motion pictures, if quality is but of slight consideration, can be produced almost as efficiently as sausages; but to make a motion picture of quality, with feeling and style and accomplish this with some degree of industrial efficiency, is indeed a task. The executive who can accomplish it is a most unusual man. He must be a combination of artist, psychologist, business man and organizer with a keen understanding of human nature, artistic and commercial values and public taste — with the vision and force to correlate them; because perfect coordination of the different elements of picture making is the only secret of producing quality efficiently. As a motion picture is or should be a work of art, it must express unity.
Plato said: "Beauty is variety in unity." At the time this statement was made beauty and art were practically synonymous terms. We have unlimited variety in a motion picture. Unity is the quality desired, the thing to strive for, as no motion picture can qualify as a meritorious work of art without it.
When we consider the various elements that enter into a complete motion picture we will gain some idea of the difficulty of securing this greatly desired quality. The motion picture of today is composed of five principal elements. These are: the story, cast, settings, photography and sound. The term direction, used by certain critics, is not one of these elements.
The director of a motion picture is, or should be, the co-ordinator of the different elements that compose it. He should take them all and obtain unity. The extent to which he succeeds is the measure of his ability. A good director should be, first, a man of vision who can see the picture as a whole and in detail, knowing the relation of one part to the other. Second, he should have sufficient knowledge of the different elements so that with them he can express the principal ideas of the story in a manner to awaken the desired emotions in the audience to whom the picture is addressed. Like the director of an orchestra, who need not be as accomplished a pianist or cellist as those of his orchestra, he must know the value and relation of each element to the other in order to achieve the desired effect.
The writer, actor, set designer, cinematographer and sound man, while required primarily to be experts in their particular fields, should have sufficient knowledge of the tasks and problems of each other to intelligently cooperate for the good of the picture as a whole.
A factor not included in the five elements outlined above, one that makes the sixth, when it is used, is color. The demand for color photography increased to an almost unbelievable extent after the advent of sound and is steadily increasing. No doubt the incongruity