Page:Pictorial beauty on the screen.djvu/218

 writhe as though in distress and the skies are of the inky blackness that fills even strong men with foreboding. The people are equally bizarre. They resemble cartoons rather than fellow humans, and their minds are strangely warped.

In the presence of all this the spectator feels that the screen has gone mad; yet he does not leave the theater, because his attention is chained and his emotions are beginning to surge with a peculiarly pleasing unrest. He stays and stares at the remarkable fitness of these crazy people in crazy places; for the story is, in fact, a madman's fantasy of crimes committed by a sleep-walker under the hypnotic control of a physician who is the head of an insane asylum.

When we examine this photoplay critically we discover, not only that the settings are perfectly sympathetic with the action, but that the various factors are skillfully organized into an excellent pictorial composition. Look, for example, at the "still," facing page 179, and you will observe the uncanny emphasis upon the dark sleep-walker who slinks along the wall and a moment later turns upward into the hallway on his evil errand to the bed-chamber of the heroine. Place that figure in an ordinary village alley and it will lose half its horror; keep it out of this weird setting and the place will cry out for some one to come into it in pursuit of crime.

Study the plan of the pictorial design and you will see that as soon as the man has emerged from the shadows in the background he becomes the strongest accent in an area of white. The end of the alley from which he comes is accented by the jagged white shape above the shadows, and the doorway through which