Page:Pictorial beauty on the screen.djvu/202

 this joining is especially delightful because it is so subtle that any spectator, though he would surely feel it, would not observe it unless he were especially occupied in the analysis of motion on the screen.

Sometimes two scenes may be joined in perfect harmony of motions and yet show a conflict of meanings. In "The Love Light," above mentioned, we have one scene where the hero is about to take refuge in the cellar beneath the room occupied by the heroine. He raises a trap door, goes down the steps, and, as he descends slowly, closes the door behind him. This downward-swinging motion of the door is in our eyes when the scene is cut, and the next instant we see the outer door of the house swinging open suddenly as the heroine rushes out into the yard. The motions of the two doors are in perfect unity and balance, but we are shocked nevertheless, because, since our minds and eyes were on the hero in the cellar, we had expected another view of him beneath the trap door.

But there are worse compositions than this in the movie theaters. Sometimes whole plays are out of unity from beginning to end. A notorious example was a photoplay called "The Birth of a Race," which began with Adam and Eve and ended up with visions of the future, touching as it ran such things as little Moses and the Daughter of Pharaoh, the slave drivers of Egypt, the exodus of Israel, the crucifixion of Christ, the three ships of Columbus, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, the World War, German spies, steel works in the United States, a strike of the workers, etc., etc. All of these scenes, were badly joined, but the greatest shock of all came when the