Page:Pictorial beauty on the screen.djvu/22

 *formance with sincere, sympathetic interpretation of a dramatic character. And now, at last, the "average movie fan" is beginning to demand that motion pictures have real pictorial beauty, that they be something more than clear photographs of things in motion.

Here we have struck the measure of the motion picture's possibilities as a new art. The masses who pay for tickets have the situation entirely in their hands. Photoplays are improving year by year principally because the public wants better photoplays year by year. When the movies were new, people were satisfied with novelties, mechanical tricks, sensational "stunts," pictures of sensational people, pictures of pretty places, etc., but, although they appreciated what was called good photography, they expressed no craving for genuine pictorial beauty. Later on came the craze for adaptations of popular novels and stage plays to the screen. This was really a great step forward. The motion picture was no longer a mere toy or trick, but was being looked upon as a real art medium. The public had developed a taste for the exciting, clearly told story, and this demand was satisfied by hundreds of excellent photoplays—excellent, at least, according to the standards of the day. Yet the "fans" might have asked for more. They got the story of a famous novel or play, with fairly well acted interpretations by screen folk in proper costumes, and with scenes and settings that usually answered to the descriptions in the literary work adapted; they even got, here and there, a "pretty" view or a chance grouping of striking beauty, but they did not regularly get, or ask for, the kind of beauty which we are accustomed to find in the masterpieces of painting. But taste has been developed by