Pictorial beauty on the screen (1923)

PICTORIAL COMPOSITION n notoriously blind to beautiful significance. You who carry kodaks for the purpose of getting souvenirs of your travels have perhaps often been surprised, when the films were developed, to discover some very conspicuous object, ugly and jarring, which you had not noticed at the time when the picture was taken. At that time your mind had forced your eye to ignore all that was not interesting and! beautiful, but the camera had made no such choice. It will not help matters to buy a better lens for your camera and to be more careful of the focus next time. Such things can only make the images more sharp ; they cannot alter the emphasis. Unfortunately there are still movie makers, and movie "fans," too, in the world who have the notion that sharpness of photography, or "clearness," as they call it, is a wonderful quality. But such people do not appreciate art; they merely appreciate machinery. To make the separate parts of a picture more distinct does not help us to see the total meaning more clearly. It may, in fact, prevent us from seeing. Let us look, for example, at the "still" reproduced 'on the opposite page. The picture is clear enough. We observe that it contains three figures and about a dozen objects. Our attention is caught by a conspicuous lamp, whose light falls upon a suspiciouslooking jug, with its stopper not too tightly in. Yet these objects, emphasized as they are, have but slight importance indeed when compared with the book clutched in the man's hand. This mistake in emphasis is not the fault of the camera; it is the fault of the director, who in the haste, or ignorance, perhaps, of days gone by, com