Pictorial beauty on the screen (1923)

PICTORIAL ART IN THE MOVIES g "location," in office and studio, in club or casual group, men and women are trying to find words and phrases. to express the cinematic beauty which they have sensed. And by that discussion they are sharpening their senses for the discovery of richer beauty in the films that are to come. My contribution to that discussion has taken the form of this book, and my aim has been, first, to collect the topics which are connected with the purely pictorial side of the movies, and, second, to formulate my conception of some of the principles which govern the creation of pictorial beauty on the screen. I have; endeavored to see my subject from various angles, as-, suming at times the position of the sensitive spectator and at times standing, as it were, beside the average^ director, and presuming to suggest to him what he ought to do to piease that spectator. i To begin with, let us take care to avoid some of the common pitfalls of photoplay criticism. It has been a common error to judge a photoplay as though it were a kind of visualized book. Many of us have slipped into the mistake of expecting motion photographs to give us the same kind of pleasure which we get from printed or spoken words. But let us understand from now on that the beauty of a designand-motion art must of necessity be quite different from the beauty of a word-and-voice art. This means that we shall have to get out of the habit of using expressions like "He is writing a photo* play." A writer might indeed devise a story for a motion picture play, as he might originate and describe an idea for a painting, but it would not in either case be proper to say that he had written the picture. This book is not a, study of words, phrases, sentences, para