Pictorial beauty on the screen (1923)

MOTIONS IN A PICTURE 85 How does the director of a motion picture make sure that pleasing motion will appear upon the screen ? Does he alter, or select, his subjects? Does he choose his point of view? Does he patiently wait for the right moment? Or must beauty come by accident, as music might come from a cat's running over the keyboard of a piano? There must be laws of pictorial motion, just as there are laws of color, design, modelling, architectural construction, all of which appeal to the eye without visible motion. And, since the motion picture can capture and combine and reproduce a greater variety of moving things than was ever before possible in the history of art, it seems particularly important that we make earnest efforts to find out under what laws these manifold motions may be organized into art. In studying the movies one might easily come to the conclusion that some directors aim only to make motions life-like. Their whole creed seems to be that a heart-broken woman should move her shoulders and chest as though she really were heart-broken, that a goat should act exactly like a goat, and that a windmill should behave itself exactly like a windmill. Now, it may be very desirable, as far as it goes, that an emotion be "registered" fitly. But to aim at fitting expression alone is to aim at naturalness alone. And this is not enough, because there may be natural ugliness, and because even the beauty of nature is essentially different from the beauty of art. Shakespeare's plays are not admired simply because they reveal human character truthfully. Rembrandt's paintings are not preserved in museums merely because