Page:Pictorial beauty on the screen.djvu/221

 painting is always a personal variation of the natural theme. If seven trees suit his composition better than the seventeen which he views, he paints only seven, and if there are only five in the grove, he creates two more on his canvas. If the waterfall is too high or too violent he reshapes it into the ideal one of his vision. This he does, not because nature is not beautiful in most of her aspects, but because no single one of those aspects fits into the scheme of the new beauty which he as an artist is trying to create.

But the cinema composer does not work in so plastic a medium as paint. The camera is only a recording machine, working without the power of altering what it sees. The subject must be altered by the director before the camera man begins "shooting." On a small scale this is perhaps already being done. Bushes, for example, may be cleared out from among the trees, and possibly even a tree or two may be chopped down in order to facilitate the carrying on of certain dramatic actions. We should like to see the ax wielded also in the cause of such things as simplicity, or balance, or rhythm in pictorial composition. Already bridges are being built especially for certain scenes in photoplays. We should like to see the cinema engineers called upon also to put an extra bend in the creek, or to make the waterfall only half as large, or to shape the bank into a more graceful slope whenever any change of that sort might serve to organize the setting more harmoniously with the general design of the picture.

Already grass has been mown to suit a director. We should like to see grass grown especially for the