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 CHAPTER VI

MOTIONS IN A PICTURE

Pictorial motion is thousands of years older than the motion picture. It is as old as the oldest art of all, the dance. Before man had learned how to weave his own fancies into plots, or how to make drawings of things that he saw, he had doubtless often feasted his eyes upon the rhythmic beauty created by dancers. Their art was the composition of motions. We can well imagine how they began by exhibiting bodily postures, gestures, and mimicry; how they proceeded to add other movements, such as the fluttering of garments, the brandishing of weapons, the waving of flaring torches, and how they, in time, made their composition more involved by swinging themselves into swaying groups, circling and threading fanciful patterns.

As a form of art the dance has been preserved through the ages in an apparently unbroken history. And it has had various off-shoots besides; for religious and secular processions, pantomime, and even drama, have had their beginnings in the dance. Pictorial motion was to be seen two thousand years ago in the Roman triumphs and processions, whose gaudiest features survive in the familiar circus parade of today.