Page:Pictorial beauty on the screen.djvu/141

 a cord vibrates in one way it gives forth a particular note, and that when the same cord vibrates in another way it gives forth a different note. He can also show you that a single cord can vibrate in several different ways at the same time. The tones and overtones thus produced constitute the peculiar timbre, or quality, of a musical note. Thus, too, in a motion picture the ensemble of all the kinds, directions, and velocities of motion constitutes the particular cinematic quality of that particular picture play. Whether that resultant quality shall be like a symphony or like the cries of a mad-house, depends on the knowledge, the skill, and the inspiration of the cinema composer.

Having named the principal motions in a picture we come now to the question of how those motions should be composed. When a musical composer sits down before his piano he knows that he may strike single notes in succession, giving a simple melody, or several notes at the same moment, producing a chord, or he may play a melody with one hand and a different melody with the other, or he may play a melody with one hand and a succession of chords with the other, or he may use both hands in playing two successions of chords. Before he is through with his composition he will probably have done all of those things.

It is much the same with the cinema composer. Before he has finished even a single scene he will probably have produced all of the different types of motions in varying directions, with varying velocities, and varying intensities. How may he know whether his work is good or bad? What are the proofs of beauty in the composition of pictorial motion?