Page:Pictorial beauty on the screen.djvu/113

 For example, "Moon-Gold," a Will Bradley production, released in 1921, presents a story of Pierrot, Columbine, and Harlequin in a series of scenes in a single plane. There is no background except blackness, and there is no foreground at all. The pictures are as flat as a poster. Such elimination of setting may have artistic merit, especially in stories of familiar or naïve themes, but in more involved stories it is desirable to include the whole setting of the action, not only because of the dramatic power of environment, but also because of the pictorial wealth which may thus be added.

To test this third balance of a picture you need only imagine a curtain of glass dropped so as to separate equally the interests near the spectator from those farther away. Such a plane is, in fact, usually imagined by a painter when he lays out his design. Though he does not cut his ground mechanically into two equal areas, he usually does distribute his subjects so that the spectator needs not feel that the foreground is only a long waste to be crossed, or that the background is but an empty region which lies beyond everything of interest.

The word "depth" in connection with the screen has doubtless made our readers think of the stereoscopic motion picture as produced by the Teleview and other companies. Such pictures are truly remarkable in their mechanical power of showing physical depth through a scene. They show you the images clearly separated, some near and some far away, so that you feel as if you could really walk in and out among them. To be able to produce such an illusion is something that any inventor may well be