Pictorial beauty on the screen (1923)

170 BEAUTY ON THE SCREEN director. They already make sunshine and wind and rain for motion pictures. We should like to see trees planted and tended for a dozen or fifty years, if necessary, in order to provide a more pictorial natural background for one or a dozen film stories. In thus advocating a new art of cinema landscape gardening we do not mean to imply that nature untouched is not full of beauty. We know well enough that the rhythm of line in the horizon of a rolling country, or in the lights and shadows of trees massed in the distance is often a delight to the beholder. But natural beauty of that sort is admissible to a cinema composition only when it is itself the dramatic theme of the story, and can be emphasized by the introduction of human figures or other elements, or when it can be subordinated to something else which is the dramatic theme. If nature cannot be thus composed she may still be photographed by the maker of scenics, travel pictures, etc., but she is of no practical value to' the director of photoplays. But there is perhaps a question brewing in some reader's mind. "Would it not be ridiculously extravagant," he asks, "to construct a real landscape especially for a photoplay, since you maintain that any particular setting, if it is a proper part of a good composition, will have little artistic value apart from the particular action for which it has been designed ?" Yes, it would certainly be extravagant to spend ten years producing a natural setting which could be used only for two days of movie "shooting." But our theories really do not lead to any such conclusion. First, any landscape which has been designed especially for cinema composition, can be "shot" from fifty or