Page:Pictorial beauty on the screen.djvu/23

 tasting, and at last the craving for pictorial art has come.

Along with this new public demand for better pictorial qualities in the motion pictures have come higher ideals to those who make and distribute motion pictures. The producers are awakening to their opportunities. They are no longer content with resurrecting defunct stage plays and picturizing them hurriedly, with only enough additions to the bare plot to make the photoplay last five reels. It is not now so much a question of fixing over something old, as of constructing something new. They are beginning to think in terms of pictorial motion. The directors, too—those who have not been forced out of the studios by their lack of ability—have learned their art of pictorial composition in much the same way as the public has developed its taste, that is, by experience. Once they seemed to think that it was enough to tell the heroine when to sob or raise her eyebrows; now they realize that the lines and pattern of the entire figure should be pictorially related to every other line and pattern which is to be recorded by the camera and shown upon the screen. And, finally, along with the director's rise in power and importance is coming the better subordination of the "stars," and yet they shine not the less brightly on the screen.

The early exhibitors were often accused of being "ballyhoo" men, hawking their wares of more or less questionable character. Most of them, indeed, never suspected that motion pictures might contain beauty. Now the worst of them can at least be classed with picture dealers who value their goods because others love them, while the best, including such men as Dr.