Page:Pictorial beauty on the screen.djvu/228

 *ture. If the director were a genuine colorist, and if he could produce the exact tint or shade of hue which the particular composition needs, and if this could be projected so that the spectator would really see what the director wanted him to see, then the conditions would be ideal for mastery in color movies. Such conditions may some day come, but they are not here now.

It is possible that the machinery of color photography will become so perfect that the spectator may be able to see on the screen the exact color values which were found in the subject photographed. But that will be only a triumph of science. It will be a scientific achievement of the same kind as the correct reproduction of colors in a lithograph or color-gravure of a painting. But art lies in the production and arrangement, not in the reproduction, of colors.

An elementary study of painting must convince any one that the colors which the artist puts on the canvas are really only suggested by the model or subject, and that his arrangement of them is inspired by an ideal personal conception, rather than a desire to reproduce something with absolute accuracy. Therein lies creation and mastery. Hence, there is no artistic advantage to a cinema composer in having machines which can make a green dress appear green, and a red rose, red, on the screen, unless that particular green and that particular red in that particular combination really add beauty to the picture.

The "tinted" scenes, usually blue or orange, which are so familiar in the movies, are not color photographs, since they are produced by immersing an ordinary black and white film in a bath of dye. But from an artistic point of view they are better than