Pictorial beauty on the screen (1923)

PICTORIAL ART IN THE MOVIES 7 quality of a photoplay can be guaranteed by engaging so-called art directors who design backgrounds or select natural settings for the action of the film story. The picture which we see on the screen consists not of backgrounds alone; it is rather an ever-varying design of moving figures combined with a fixed or changing background. If an art director limits his work to the preparation of material environment of photoplay action, he is, by definition, responsible only for the place-element in the motion picture. Even if he were to design costumes and general equipment for the players he would still be responsible for only a part of the pictorial elements that appear upon the screen. Plot, performers, places, equipment — these are only the materials which a picture-maker puts into cinematic forms. The art does not lie in the separate materials; it lies in the organization of those materials, a process which may be called cinema composition.* In a later chapter we shall discuss the proposition that the motion picture director is, or certainly should be, the master cinema composer. Here we simply want to make the point that criticism should concern itself with the finished composition as a whole and not with the parts alone. The critic who is interested only in the plot construction of photoplays may indeed be able to make penetrating comment upon such dramatic qualities as suspense, logic, etc., but he cannot thereby give us any information on those visual aspects which please or displease the eye while the picture is showing. Thus also the critic who looks only * The terms "cinema composer" and "cinema composition" were devised by the author in 1916, at the time when he and his students founded the Cinema Composers Club at Columbia University.