The art of sound pictures (1930)

FEELINGS AND EMOTIONS 149 These mixed emotions include a tremendous variety of emotional states. They are termed sorrow, joy, fear, rage, grief, love, pity, sympathy, admiration, hatred, jealousy, and so on. Some are predominantly pleasant because they represent allied or harmonious combinations of simpler elements. The unpleasant emotions all represent states of conflict between two or more elementary emotions. Joy, love, relief, passion, and admiration are pleasant. Sorrow, fear, rage, grief, hatred, and jealousy are all unpleasant. In building stories for the screen, we use both pleasant and unpleasant emotions. The emotions which represent conflict within the mind of the character portrayed should be used only in contrast to the pleasant emotions. The use of fear alone, for example, would have such an unpleasant effect on the audience witnessing the picture in which this one emotion alone was portrayed that the theater would be deserted after a single showing. A picture, however, which depicted its hero afflicted by fear during the early part of the story might show him meeting a girl who inspires him to conquer his fear and dominate the obstacles which confront him. In the end, this conflict emotion is conquered and repulsed by the pleasant emotions, dominance and love, and the total pleasant effect on the audience through this contrast makes it approve of the picture. Many writers, especially young people who have not experienced the extreme unpleasantness caused by conflict emotions, portray too many unpleasant emotions in their stories. These stories depict unthinkable horrors and terrible emotional agonies suffered by the principal characters, and are, of course, unacceptable because