Pictorial beauty on the screen (1923)

i34 BEAUTY ON THE SCREEN extends to the castle. This relation can be clearlyseen by holding the "still" upside down. The reader must keep in mind, of course, that in a "still" the arrested motion has not the same weight as the actual motion on the screen, and consequently the fixed things get more than their share of weight. Therefore in this "still" from "The Four Horsemen" the jagged holes in the buildings attract more attention than they do on the screen, where the movement of the soldiers and civilians brings the whole composition into balance. When the whole picture is deep, as in the example just discussed, it offends us if some of the moving objects come near the camera, because this produces two pictures within a single frame, namely, a close-up and a long shot. The effect is as bad as that of listening to an orchestra so placed that some of the instruments are five feet away from our ears while the others are seventy-five feet away. In either case there comes a sense of violence instead of restfulness. The close-up superposed on the long shot is a common fault in photoplays. But we are often annoyed by the opposite fault also, that of jumbling two sets of actions which are going on in adjoining areas, one just beyond the other. In such a case the director should contrive to make the vertical planes seem farther apart than they really are ; and it can easily be done without cleaving the picture in two. To prove this let us imagine a cabaret scene containing prominent persons of the play sitting at tables near the camera, and a number of couples dancing on a floor farther away. In such an arrangement it is probable that the diners have more dramatic value