Page:Pictorial beauty on the screen.djvu/15



If I look upon a motion picture as a kind of substitute for some stage play or novel, it seems to me a poor thing, only a substitute for something better; but if I look upon it as something real in itself, a new form of pictorial art in which things have somehow been conjured into significant motion, then I get many a glimpse of touching beauty, and I always see a great range of possibilities for richer beauties in future examples of this new art. Then I see the motion picture as the equal of any of the elder arts.

In other words, I enjoy the movies as pictures, and I do not enjoy them as anything else but pictures. Yet it is on the pictorial side that the movies are now in greatest need of improvement. And this need will probably continue for at least another ten years. I feel that a book such as this may prove to be of considerable help in bringing about that improvement. So far as I know, this is the first book in which a systematic analysis of pictorial composition on the screen has been attempted, although there are certain earlier books in which the pictorial art of the screen has been appraised without analysis, the pioneer work in that class being Vachel Lindsay's "Art of the Moving Picture." The most original things in my present volume are to be found in the chapters on "Pictorial Motions"—or, at least, they ought to be there, else