Page:Pictorial beauty on the screen.djvu/223

 a hundred different points of view, and yet can have separate artistic value from every angle. And, second, any such landscape would alter itself periodically and gradually through seasons and years. And, third, the cinema landscape engineer could make considerable alterations again and again without destroying the landscape. Thus, even if only a single square mile of land were used, it might well serve a film company for a number of years; and meanwhile other landscapes would be in the making on other square miles of land. However, it is not the critic's business to enter into the ways and means of financing the production of art. He only undertakes to express the refined taste of the thoughtful public, the public which in the long run it will pay the producers to please.

We desire the director's mastery in the movies to extend also to that phase of pictorial composition which is known as the "cutting and joining" of scenes. Bad work in this department of photoplay making is something which cannot be counteracted by the most inspired pantomime, by the most beautiful setting, or by the most perfect composition in the separate scenes. Without careful cutting and joining the photoplay can never achieve that dynamic movement, that rhythmical flow which is a characteristic and distinguishing quality of the motion picture as art. It should be as important for the cinema composer to decide upon the progression and transformation of scenes as it is for the poet to arrange the order and transitions of his own verses and stanzas, or for the musical composer to arrange the movement through the music which he writes. Some directors seem to forget that a piece