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PICTORIAL BEAUTY IN THE PHOTOPLAY 179
tenement, or a prison. He must be a cartoonist, a costumer, a marine painter, a designer of ships, an interior decorator, a landscape painter, a dramatist, an inventor, an historical, and now, an acoustical expert — in fact, a "Jack of all Trades."
A word about the cameraman and the importance of his work. The development of photography has kept pace with that of the set. The cameraman has brought his work to a fine art. His equipment has become much more complete, and he too, has become a specialist. He does the actual photographing, which means that he has been handed the results of the previous workers, and through his photography he has great possibilities for good as well as harm to the picture. His responsibility is a grave one and the art director can often aid him by properly designing the sets. The cameraman must see that the star is photographed to her best advantage. Close-ups are the most difficult because the accentuated dramatic action and their composition and lighting must be perfect. He must see that the desired pictorial effect is obtained from the scene as a whole. He must take infinite pains with his lighting and his composition, and he must carefully watch the development of the film. Many times the cameraman, after a twelve hour day, has to go over to the laboratory and watch his negative and time its development himself, because if the negative is overdone or underdone, his photography will suffer. You have to be careful that the film is neither too light nor too dark, or it scratches when run and then after it has been run six or eight times it is full of scratches and oil. If it is in a medium key you don't see it so much. If extremely low or extremely dark, it is full of holes and flashes and everything else.
Not only must he do these many things, but he usually has to do them under pressure of time. He must select his compositions with very little previous study. He must light for continuous and changing movement, rather than for one beautiful picture. He must sacrifice for visibility many lovely light effects in low keys. He must remember that the film will be run many times, and by projectionists of all sorts, so that what constitutes beautiful soft photography in his projection room, may look very poor when handled by the projectionist in some small Arkansas village for instance.
The advent of the talking picture, as you realize, disturbed the craft in all branches of motion picture production. The addition of speech has, possibly, made the reliance on pictorial values a bit less vital. History seems to be repeating itself. Just as the novelty of movement on the screen was sufficient to hold the first audiences, so the novelty of hearing people talk on the screen was at first important enough to satisfy the curious audience. Pictorial beauty, so far as the first talking pictures were concerned, was noticeable by its absence. The public soon began to feel this. There was something lacking, and that something was that pictorial beauty that was in a very subtle manner an important element in the silent picture.