Pictorial beauty on the screen (1923)

PICTORIAL MOTIONS AT PLAY 123 scene into a single rhythm by suffusing all its elements with the warm glow of the furnace and by playing over them all the same movement of quivering light and shadow. This vibrant, welding beauty which lady and laborer and machine may have in common, while still retaining their individual dramatic significance, will thus give the touch of art to a motion picture which might otherwise be merely a crude photographic record of an incident in a story. Another way of bringing two conflicting motions into a rhythmical relation is to place between them a third motion which, by being somewhat like either of the other two, bridges the gap and thus transforms a sense of fixed opposition into a sense of moving variety. It would be somewhat of a shock, for instance, to shift our view instantly from the rippling flow of a narrow stream to the wheels and levers of a mill. But there would undoubtedly be a sense of continuity, and perhaps of rhythm, in shifting from a general view of the stream to a view of the water-wheel over which it flows, and thence to the wheels of the machinery inside the mill. This method of interposing a harmonizer might be useful also in carrying over the rhythm of motion into the rhythm of fixed forms. Thus if we were to throw upon the screen a picture of the gently rolling sea, sharply followed by a view of the sweeping horizon of the hills, it is most probable that the two kinds of rhythm would not unite to draw a single emotional response from the spectator. He would feel only the contrast. But if the view of the sea were followed by a view of a field of grain, whose wind-driven billows resembled the waves of the sea and whose rolling