Page:Pictorial beauty on the screen.djvu/140

 can make a horse float in the air like a real Pegasus; or by the cinematographic acceleration of motion which can out-rival an Indian conjuror in making a tree rise, blossom, and bear fruit while you are watching.

Another peculiar type of pictorial motion, which has never before existed, and does not come into being until it is projected upon the screen, is the magic motion of the "animated cartoons." The camera-man sees no such marvelous motions. He faces only a stack of drawings. The artist who makes the drawings does not see the motions except in his own imagination. But the spectator in the theater is delighted to see the strangely bewitched men and beasts, birds and trees, rocks and streams, weapons and machines, all behaving in impossible ways that no maker of fairy tales ever dreamed of. Here is a new field of pictorial composition, with distant boundaries and fabulous wealth. Those who exploit it will be able to teach many a valuable lesson to the director who merely takes photographs of actors in motion.

Nearly all of these motions might be found in a single "shot," that is, in a single section of film. But when these sections of film are joined together to form the finished photoplay they produce still another kind of motion, a constant shifting from scene to scene. Whether this succession is to be a series of collisions or a harmonious flow, depends upon those who cut and join the films.

There is finally the total movement which is the product of all of these motions working together. A scientist can show you in his laboratory that when