Pictorial beauty on the screen (1923)

MASTERY IN THE MOVIES 157. came to his hand ready-made was not held sacred. He twisted it, tore out pieces from it, or spun it together with other plots similarly altered. And even then the altered plot, though an improvement over the raw material, was not a masterpiece; it was only a better framework for masterly treatment. In the art of Shakespeare it is the telling, not the framework, of the story that counts. Hence any play of his becomes a poor thing indeed if you take away from it the tone-color of his words, the rhythm of his lines, the imaginative appeal of his imagery, the stimulating truth in his casual comment on character and deed. When a play of Shakespeare is filmed, those literary values are lost ; it cannot in the nature of the motion picture be otherwise. On the other hand, the distinctive value and particular charm of a photoplay lies in its pictorial treatment, in what the director does pictorially with the subject in hand. And that distinctive value would in turn be lost if some one else attempted to transfer the picture to a literary medium. In view of all this it is surely fair to say that if a writer and a picture-maker were to co-operate in producing a piece of literature, the writer should be in command; but when they co-operate in producing a picture the picture-maker should be in command. Now when the director is in command of the story, what does he do with it? He may permit the incidents to stand in their original order, or he may change or omit or add. But in any case he sweeps away the phrases, sentences, and paragraphs which describe the places of the action, and erects instead real settings, or selects suitable "locations" from already existing set