Pictorial beauty on the screen (1923)

p BEAUTY ON THE SCREEN A similar experience of ease comes from viewing rhythmical or balanced motions. You would not enjoy watching a dancer whose every movement was entirely unlike every previous movement. The effect would be utter confusion. You could not grasp, could not remember, what you saw. And you would probably say that it was not dancing at all. On the contrary, the beauty of a dance is largely due to the frequent repetitions or similarities of movements. Again and again you see and enjoy the same flexing of knee and poising of foot, the same curving of back and tossing of head, the same sweeping of hand and floating of drapery; and again and again the dancer moves through the same path of circling lines. Yet in these repetitions there are slight variations, too, because no human being works with the precision of a machine. And as you watch the dance you get variety without multiplicity; you see much with ease. "Now, look here," cuts in some old-time producer, "you don't mean to say that you want our actors to dance through a drama, do you — a murder scene, or a wedding, or a meeting of profiteers to raise the price of soap?" No, indeed, we do not. In fact, we are hardly thinking of them as actors at all — not in this chapter. We are merely thinking of them as moving shapes upon a screen. And we want those shapes to move about in such a way that the motions will not hurt our eyes. If we study those films that please us most we shall discover easy continuity of movement, so that a path of motion described in any one scene is extended, as it were, into a similar path of motion in the following