Pictorial beauty on the screen (1923)

MYSTERIOUS EMOTIONS OF ART 179 stirred you. You may be impressed by the likeness of the portrait, by the engaging character of the person portrayed, and by some significant truth expressed in that portrayal. But that is not all. You are also stirred by the colors in the painting, by the peculiar arrangement of lines and shapes. That emotion which you get from the form and medium itself, rather than from the subject, is a characteristic art-emotion. We are not now speaking of such qualities as unity, emphasis, balance, and rhythm. They are indeed fundamental needs in pictorial composition, and yet a photoplay may have all of those qualities without possessing any strong appeal as art. A motion picture, like a painting, must possess other, more subtle, qualities if it is to make any lasting impression upon our souls. What these mysterious qualities really are, we do not presume to know. At the same time we believe that a discussion of them will be stimulating and helpful both to "movie fans" and movie makers. Suppose we endeavor to isolate four of these mysterious qualities in art and call them poignancy, appeal to the imagination, exquisiteness, and reserve. Any one who goes frequently to the movies must have felt more than once a certain poignancy, a strange fascination in some pictorial arrangement, in some curiously appealing movement on the screen. Perhaps such a feeling came when you saw a "dissolve" for the first time. Perhaps the slow dying away of a scene, even while a new one was dawning before you, gave a pang of pleasure never felt before, not even in the magic blending of dreams. A "queer feeling" you may have called it, and you may have been less aware of it as the novelty wore off in later shows.