Pictorial beauty on the screen (1923)

78 BEAUTY ON THE SCREEN as though you yourself were drawing these lines with a brush or crayon. Analyze the composition and you will see how richly the lines are woven together. Compare all the small curves with each other, compare all the larger curves, all the short straight lines, all the longer straight lines, etc., and you will discover an amazing amount of alternation and repetition, with an equally amazing amount of deviation from regularity. Imagine that the painting which we have just analyzed is an accented moment in a motion picture, and you must imagine another similar design a few seconds earlier in the action and still another one a few seconds later, as the woman walks gracefully through the room. In fact, there would be a whole series of similar designs during the brief time that the woman's figure and the urn are in decorative contact. The instant of action which the painter has chosen to fix on canvas might well be the same instant which you would select as the pictorial climax in this motion picture. This climax, accented perhaps with a pause, accented also by the pictorial approach and departure, is something which you would long remember as a rhythmical moment in the photoplay. In the picture which we have just described the rhythm is found chiefly in the continuity and richness of line and in a certain active balancing of similar with dissimilar lines. The design is simple, almost plain. It is a single pattern which does not recur again within the frame. Quite different in type is the composition of a group picture such as "The Banquet of the Officers of St. Andrew," facing page 79, where the rhythm is in the flow of patterns rather than in