Photoplay Magazine, January 1921 (anuary 1921)

74 Photoplay Magazine From the earliest use of artistic detail to modern simplification. Fannie ^A/a^d in **The Cheat" — a Belascoan product by Wilfred Buckland. ever-elaborate though in good taste. "The Call of the East." with Tsuru Aoki as the Japanese maid. made by the same company some years later, with simplicity adding to the atmosphere and dramatic effectiveness. place actor, Alvin Wycoff, cameraman, and Wilfred Buckland. long Belasco's art man, may divide the credit. At any rate here were faces, groups, and interiors lit by a warm glow of light, clear and yet full of the modeling of delicate shadows, and dramatized by discriminating concentration from one gen- eral source. At one point a touch of "back lighting" shot across the scene, picked out a curve of throat, a twist of bright hair, or a fold of lace for a glowing, glistening high- light. There was something else to the pictures of Lasky. There were backgrounds to catch the light into shadows. Because Buckland had worked with the master-realist of the stage, he brought something besides the Belasco plays to Lasky. He brought tasteful richness of setting. Under the flat lighting of most movies, it would have bored and distracted with quite the force that it does on the stage. Occasionally it did this in some of the fairy films of Lasky's sister-company, the Famous Players—in much of "Snow White" and "The Blue Bird" for example. But made over by "Lasky Lighting"—as it is today in most of the Famous Players-Lasky productions— it has a splendid and satisfying richness. It is the danger of distracting the eyes from the actors by over-developing setting or costumes, which made the next contribution to the screen picture so immensely valuable. An- other art director, Robert Brunton, under the supervision of Thomas H. Ince, undertook that ever essential task in creative progress—elimination. He built his settings with taste and restraint, but he made assurance doubly sure by blotting them out with shadows. Realism and min- utia he borrowed, and light from a single major source; but with one he killed the other. Through windows, doors, high casements or shaded lamps, he drove his light upon the actors of his films, and almost upon the actors alone. They held the center of the stage, illu- mined and dramatized by light. Behind them were mere suggestions of place— surfaces that were at once atmosphere and a frame. Lasky and Buckland. Ince and Brunton have given us the essential structure of the screen picture. You can go no farther in prin- ciple. Directors, art direc- tors and camera men have absorbed all this and con- tributed nothing new. The rest—the future—lies in the expansion and refinement of An excellent composition in masses of light and shade. Arthur Hopkins, director. A scene from "The Eternal Magdalene." what they have established. And, that, of course, is where the individual artist—whether architect, electrician, camera man or director—comes in. At least one artist has made splendid progress in the physical things, in the designing of settings. He is Hugo Ballin, the mural decorator, who worked for some two years with Goldwyn. A great part of Ballin's work has been rendered commonplace by the compromise and hustle of a great studio. But most of it has borne authentic marks of progress. He has left unorna- mented the solid walls that beaverboard allows the studio to substitute for the canvas of the stage. He has used draperies ingeniously, constructing a Sherry's handsomer than Sherry's out of a few tall stone pillars and some heavy curtains. He has applied design skillfully and with discretion. Above all he has kept his background subdued and his floors free of cluttering furniture. Consequently, the actors can be easily detected on the screen, even by the most unpracticed eye. Hugo Ballin would go farther. Until now he has spent his time making a solid, tasteful and expensive background that tries to eliminate itself by pure restraint. His own belief is that he could eliminate it much more cheaply and effectively by not making it at all. He believes in the Ince-Brunton effect of lighted actors with a mere suggestion of atmosphere about them. If he had his way, he would get it by starting with the light—and the shadows—and adding just the few bits of draperies and corners of walls or doors that would actually appear on the finished film. It is a little difficult to decide whether the simplicity of the theory or the immense saving it would make, prevents the harassed producers from letting him do it. Ballin not only made sketches and ground plans of settings; he worked out on every ground plan the positions of the camera for the various scenes; and while the photoplay was be- ing photographed Ballin stood beside a professional director day in and day out studying positions, group- ings, action, business and lighting—everything that went to make the finished production. There have been experi- ments on the screen with the highly conventionalized, almost posteresque style of scenery which has crept into the theater under the stimulus of the new theories of stagecraft. A number of scenes in "The Blue Bird" showed the