Pictorial beauty on the screen (1923)

PICTORIAL COMPOSITION 17 would be the second thrill, beautiful in itself but not actually tending to emphasize the "punch" of a man transferring from one airplane to another. The third thrill would surely come when the hydroairplane swings up through these clouds, like a dolphin from the sea, and yet not like a dolphin, because it rises more slowly and in a few moments soars freely into the air, a marvellous happening which no words can describe. Yet this thrill, like the others, would exhaust our emotions rather than leave them fresh for the "punch" we started out to produce, the transfer of a man from one airplane to another. Most thrilling of all would be the moments between the instant when the villain is pushed off the wing of the plane and the instant when his parachute snaps open. The white mass of the parachute, almost like a tiny cloud, spreads out at the instant when it reaches the layer of clouds, as if they pushed it open; then the parachute sinks into the clouds and dies out like a wave of the sea. After all these thrills, the intended "punch" would come like a slap on the wrist. A man might now leap back and forth from one airplane to another until it was time to go home for supper, and we would only yawn at his exploits. Now one of the morals of this story is that we did get a "punch," even though it was not the one originally intended by our imagined producer. Treasures often lie in unsuspected places. Nearly every common-place film on the screen contains some beauty by accident, some unexpected charm, some unforseen "punch," something the director never dreamed of, which outshines the very beauty which he aimed to