Pictorial beauty on the screen (1923)

12 BEAUTY ON THE SCREEN posed the picture so badly that the spectators are forced to look first at the wrong things, thus wasting time and energy before they can find the right things. On the screen, to be sure, the book attracts some attention because it is in motion, yet that does not suffice to draw our attention immediately away from the striking objects in the foreground. The primary interests should, of course, have been placed in the strongest light and in the most prominent position. Guiding the attention of the spectator properly helps him to understand what he is looking at, but it is still more important to help him feel what he is looking at. Movie producers used to have a great deal to say about the need of putting "punch" into a picture, of making it so strong that it would "hit the audience between the eyes." Well, let those hot injunctions still be given. We maintain that good composition will make any motion picture "punch" harder, and that bad composition will weaken the "punch," may, indeed, prevent its being felt at all. But before arguing that proposition, let us philosophize a bit over the manner in which a "punch" operates on our minds. Anything that impresses the human mind through the eye requires a three-fold expenditure of human energy. There is, first, the physical exertion of looking, then the mental exertion of seeing, that is, understanding what one looks at, and, finally, the joy of feeling, the pouring out of emotional energy. This last is the "punch," the result which every artist aims to produce; but it can only be achieved through the spectator's enjoyment of looking and seeing. Now, since the total human energy available at any one time for looking, seeing, and feeling is limited, it