Pictorial beauty on the screen (1923)

PICTORIAL MOTIONS AT REST 139 tain flakes and follow them from a height until they strike* the ground; but rather we keep our line of sight steady upon a certain spot while the changing texture slips by. One can get the same effect by looking down from a tall building into a crowded street. The individuals are no longer thought of as separate moving objects, because they weave themselves into a broad band of moving and changing texture. Here we get the feeling of restfulness, of motion in repose, in contrast to the feeling of restless motion when we ourselves become part of that crowd. A delightful picture in "Barbary Sheep," directed by Maurice Tourneur, is the view of a flock of sheep moving slowly along from left to right. The animals are so crowded together that the mass as a whole has a textural quality. And yet it is not fixed texture, like that of cloth, because some of the sheep move faster and then again more slowly than the others, and thus, as in the case of the snow flakes, or the crowd in the street, give us a vital stimulus of change within the texture itself. A somewhat similar sense of rest comes from watching those motions which arise and vanish within some given area of the screen. A cloud of cigarette smoke which floats and coils for a. few moments and then fades into nothing, bubbles which rise in a pool and break into faint ripples that finally die on the glassy surface, the blazing and dimming of tones through the photographic device of the "fade-out" and the "fade-in" — all changes of this type we sense vividly as movements, and yet as movements in delightful repose. At the beginning of this chapter we mentioned the