Pictorial beauty on the screen (1923)

130 BEAUTY ON THE SCREEN war dance directly in front of the waterfall, that would1 throw the composition still more out of balance. Or if, at the opening of the scene, the Indians appeared dancing in front of the bare cliff, and then gradually moved over to a place in front of the waterfall, this cluttering of motions would certainly unbalance the picture. Such cluttering is common on the screen because of the many movie directors who either are afraid of simplicity, or lack the skill which is necessary to make complexity appear simple. In the scene just mentioned the safest course would be to leave out the waterfall, however much of a natural wonder it may be, and to let the bare cliff serve as the entire background for the Indian dance. But if this cannot be done because of the peculiar demands of the plot, then the picture might be balanced by introducing some additional motion in the right half, say a column of smoke rising from a camp fire. Thus even the careful addition of a new element would tend to bring unity and restfulness into the arrangement of parts. Just visualize that composition, the whitish water falling on one side, and the light gray smoke rising on the other, and you will feel a peculiar restful balance which could never be obtained by a mechanical pairing of two waterfalls or two columns of smoke. As critics searching for beauty on the screen, we might even carry our demand for pictorial balance still farther. In some other picture we might demand that there be motions in the upper part of the composition to balance those in the lower part. To be sure, we would hardly look for such balance in a stage play, or in an ordinary cinema scene where the