Pictorial beauty on the screen (1923)

MYSTERIOUS EMOTIONS OF ART i8g store counter, in order to convince the audience that she spends a few sacred moments of the day attending to her finger nails. Walls of rooms must be paneled off by scores of framed pictures, mirrors, etc., so that, no matter where the actor stands, his head will be strikingly set off by some ornamental frame. Floors must look partly like an Oriental bazaar and partly like a fur market. Chairs, tables, cabinets, beds, and what-nots, must carry our minds to Versailles and the Bronx, to Buckingham Palace, and Hollywood. Hangings of plush and silk, tapestries of cloth of gold, curtains of lace or batiked silk, cords of intricate plaiting, must flow from the heights, waving in the breeze to prove that they are real. All this extravagance must be, we presume, in order to show that the heroine lives on an income and not a salary, and in order to give the brides in the audience new ideas for mortgaging their husbands' futures at the installment-plan stores. With such extravagance of materials in a picture there can be no simplicity or reserve in the pictorial composition, if indeed there can be any composition at all. Whatever design the director gives to the miscellaneous lines and shapes will seem rather like a last despairing effort than the easy, happy touch of a master's hand. The hysterical extravagance of the movies is further illustrated in the breathless speed which so often characterizes every moving thing on the screen. We feel that, at the end of the road, horses must expire from exhaustion and automobiles must catch fire from excessive friction. Clouds are driven by hurricanes, rivers shoot, trees snap, and the most dignified gentle