Pictorial beauty on the screen (1923)

EYE TESTS FOR BEAUTY 47 Oppositions and conflicts baffle and bewilder the eye and mind, but concurrent co-operating motions please them. It is easy, for example, to look at the shower of fire from a sky rocket, because the lines move in similar directions and remain comparatively near together, each one, as it were, helping the others, so that what we see in one part of the motion is a key to the rest of the motion. There is a similar unity and rhythmical balance in the motion of a flock of birds, a school of fish, or a group of dancers, the billows of the sea, or the feathery fall of snowflakes. The production of harmonious motions in a photoplay might seem to us spectators to be merely a matter of spying with a camera and catching views cf harmonious actions and settings. But the problem is not so simple. For the movements within any given scene may be perfectly orchestrated with respect to each other, and yet may clash with every one of the movements in the following scene. If in one picture our eyes and minds have adjusted themselves to the delicate threading of snow-flakes, falling like a softly changing tapestry, they can only be shocked by a sudden jump to the vigorous curling of a sea wave breaking on the beach. And in our natural desire to appreciate both subjects at once we are disappointed to find that each has spoiled the other. Delicacy looks at power and thinks it violence; power looks at delicacy and thinks it weakness. It is a visual effect such as one would get from a drawing where the hair lines of the finest pen and thinnest ink were crossed by the coarse marks of a blunt piece of charcoal. So sharp a contrast might have a certain dramatic, stirring effect, like the use of swear words in a