Pictorial beauty on the screen (1923)

PICTORIAL MOTIONS AT REST 129 cinema composer who can make moving things suggest rest. Let me propose the following as working theories to explain the effect of reposefulness in organized pictorial motions: First, that the separate motions are balanced against each other; Second, that the significant motions are kept near to a center of rest within the frame of the picture, are sometimes even limited to an exceedingly small area of the screen ; and, Third, that every significant motion is harmonized in kind, direction, and tempo with everything else in the picture. The balancing of pictorial motions does not imply that they must be paired off in exact equals. Certainly we do not insist that a dramatic scene be so composed that when, for example, a person rises from a chair in one part of a room, some other person sits down in a chair in the opposite part of the room. Such an effect would be highly mechanical, like the teetering of a see-saw; and it is not possible for a spectator to get a thrill of beauty while his attention is being held down to mechanics. We mean rather to apply the same reasoning to pictorial motions which we have in Chapter V applied to fixed lines, shapes, and tones. In short, we want to see the values of pictorial motions so well distributed over the screen, and so related to each other, that they give the impression of being in perfect equilibrium. Suppose we imagine a cinema scene which contains a waterfall in the left half, and nothing in the right half except a dark, uninteresting side of a cliff. That composition would be out of balance. And if a band of Indians entered the scene from the left and did a