Page:Pictorial beauty on the screen.djvu/211

 swaying willow tree and with the shadows playing over the ground, can be discovered only by experiments viewed from the angle of the camera. And even then, after the action has been carefully planned through a succession of rehearsals, it may have to be varied during the actual "shooting." A sudden change of wind or light or an unexpected movement of a dog or horse may bring in a new factor that must be instantly taken into account.

At the beginning and end of a scene the player should be especially pliable under the hands of the director, because the latter alone knows what the cinematic connection is to be with the preceding and following scenes. The lack of control in this pictorial continuity is often evident on the screen. Separate scenes become little dramas in themselves, and the whole photoplay is then really a succession of acts, with a structure always tending to fall apart, instead of cohering firmly into a unity. The peculiar difficulty in the movies is that the scenes are not taken in the same order as they are projected in the theater. On the screen the scenes shift more quickly than the actors could pass from one setting to the next, and yet the actual taking of those actions may have been weeks or even months apart. This is so because it is more economical to let the particular setting, and not the continuity of action, determine the grouping of the "shots."

Thus, for example, the scenes numbered 9, 22, 25, 41, 98, and 133, with a drawing-room as setting, may all be taken on a single day, while numbers 8, 40, and 134, with a street as setting, may be taken some other day. And still another group of disconnected