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 CHAPTER V.

RHYTHM AND REPOSE IN FIXED DESIGN

Directness, ease, emphasis, unity—these are the things which we have just demanded of cinema composition, the pictorial form which contains, and at the same time reveals, the story of a photoplay. But we demand something more. We do not get complete aesthetic pleasure from any composition which merely contains and reveals something else. The vessel, while serving to convey its treasure, should have a charm of its own. In poetry, for example, we are not satisfied with the language which merely expresses the poetic content in clear and forceful style. We crave poetic language, too, words and sentences that sound like music and that by their very form appeal to our fancy.

In fact most people who have a highly developed taste for pictorial art, consider that beauty of treatment is more important than beauty of subject. Their emotions are stirred by something in the arrangement of the lines, masses, tones, and colors, something that serves other purposes than those of clearness, coherence, and emphasis. What that something is, has always been a great question to students of æsthetics. Mr. Clive Bell, for example, suggests that the essential beauty of art lies in "significant form." But you