Pictorial beauty on the screen (1923)

18 BEAUTYI ON THE SCREEN produce. And whenever a thoughtful person is stirred by such accidental beauty he is delighted to think that such a thing is possible. In the exceptional films, he knows, such effects are produced by design instead of by chance. It is better business, and it is better art. We said at the beginning of this chapter that it was clearly desirable to economize the spectator's efforts of looking and seeing, in order that he may have the greatest possible amount of energy left for the experience of emotion. This is desirable even from a business man's point of view. We shall now try to show that emotional thrills can actually be controlled by design, by what we shall call pictorial composition. But how is pictorial composition controlled, and who controls it? How far is the scenario writer responsible for pictorial value? How much of the pictorial composition shall the director direct, and how much of it may safely be left to other hands? And, if a picture is well composed, does that guarantee beauty? The answers to these questions depend upon our definition of terms. Composition in general means, of course, simply bringing things together into a mutual relation. A particular combination of parts in a picture may help the spectator, or may hinder him more than some other possible combination of the same parts. Composition is form, and as such should be revealing and expressive at the same time that it is appealing in itself. Good composition cannot easily be defined in a single sentence, but, for the sake of order in our discussion, I wish to offer the following as my working