Pictorial beauty on the screen (1923)

PICTORIAL COMPOSITION 21 But the process would, of course, still be composition. If, for example, he were to say to himself "Tomorrow I shall paint a picture of a rose in a slateblue vase standing on an antique oak table backed by a gray panel," that very arrangement of images in his mind would be the first phase of his composition. Or if a customer were to come to him and say "Tomorrow I want you to paint for me a picture of a rose," etc., the process of bringing things together would still be composition; only in that case it begins with the customer and is completed by the painter. If we apply this reasoning to the movies it is clear that as soon as a scenario writer writes a single line saying that a hydro-airplane takes off from the sea, he has already started a pictorial composition. Although he may not realize it, he has already brought together the long straight line of the horizon, the short curving lines of the waves, and the short straight and oblique lines of the plane. He has already made it necessary to combine certain tonal values of airplane and sky and sea, though he may not have stopped to consider what those tonal values might be. But the writer does other things of greater consequence than the combining of shapes and tonal values. He prescribes motions and locomotions of things, and he orders the succession of scenes. Even if he writes only that "a plane rises from the sea," he makes necessary the combination of a great number of movements. On the screen that plane will have at least four movements, namely, rising, tilting, going toward the right or the left, and the movement of diminishing size. And the sea will have at least three movements, namely, undulation, flowing, and the movement of the