Pictures and the Picturegoer (Jan-Dec 1924)

44 Pictures and Pichjrevoer JANUARY 1924 Above : A Swedish idyll in " The Gay Knight." Left : Rubens or Holbein would have delighted in the heroine, and settings, and quaint interiors in " Youth to Youth." recently a whole series of films were produced around well-known paintings, commencing with King Cophetna and The Beggar Maid, the chief result of which was the discovery of Mary Astor, now a favourite star. The most original amongst the directors, Stroheim, George Pearson, and others, use pictorial values as an element of suggestion. Lights and shadows are cleverly arranged so as to give expression to and deepen the emotions of the scene or even of one character in the scene. There are A contented-looking " Laughing Cavalier," in " The Gay Knight: hundreds of examples to be found in the work of these two, more perhaps than in that of any other movie maker. There was something similar in John Robertson's Jckyll and Hyde — the street along which the repulsive " Hyde " is seen scurrying along on his sinister business. Pearson's Wee McGregor's Sweetheart, too, had many of these touches, and Maurice Elvey's Romance of Wastdale cleverly suggested that the main story was a dream by playing these sequences mostly in silhouette shadows. Pearson's underworld settings in Love, Life, and Laughter have a distinctly Hogarthian atmosphere. So far as originality goes, British directors are well to the fore. Their canvases have been of necessity smaller than those of foreign fellow-workers, but their out-of-door effects are unequalled, except perhaps. by those of D. W. Griffith, whose pastorales are always most beautifully chosen and photographed. D. W.'s contribution to pictorial art is the soft focus picture, which came to its full beauty in Broken Blossoms but ran wild in Dream Street and Romance. And Cecil D.e Mille in his early productions evolved scenes far more picturesquely beautiful than anything he has done since, excepting The Ten Commandments, the " stills " of which show many really artistic compositions. The White Sister, too, has an ideally lovely series of scenes of cloistral beauty. " The Garden of Rest," a world-famous painting has been reproduced in a movie, and " The Doctor," equally well-known, forms the opening " shot " of Neilan's The Eternal Three. Producers are all beginning to wake up to the fact that natural backgrounds are more beautiful than anything the property man can devise. A fact that Cecil Hepworth has been demonstrating all his movie life. Both he and Henry Edwards have many New Masters to their credit, besides a few reproductions of Old Masters. These last though, are largely unconscious, and arise out of the real similarity between the form of paintings on canvas, and screen pictures, as they see them. But the possibilities of the Moving Pictures as a work of art have scarcely been discovered as yet. It is probable that colour processes will be evolved that will still further enhance its beauty, arityl projectors perfected which will give the coveted third dimension. In any case, it is the Art of the Future, for its field is so wide. Where the masterpieces in canvas lie enshrined in big cities, to which pilgrimage must be made, the masterpieces in celluloid are just around the corner, and within reach of everybody, whether rich or poor. And, whereas many a man lives and dies without ever having looked upon one of the genuine Old Masters, never a Fan (and we are all Movie Fans nowadays), existed yet who has not' consciously or unconsciously seen and learned something about Beauty from one or other of the New ones