Page:Pictorial beauty on the screen.djvu/237

 similar examples in a few evenings. Over and over again a director will lead us to the threshold of beautiful fancy, only to slam the door of hard realism against our faces. Why is this? Is it because the director thinks that audiences are incapable of exercising and enjoying their imaginations? Or is it only because he wants to get more footage for the film?

As though it were not bad enough to spoil the pictorial beauty of cinema composition, many directors proceed to spoil the charm of other arts, too. Poetry, for instance, may weave her spells elsewhere, but not upon the screen. Even the simplest poetic statement must be vulgarized by explanation. "Movie fans" are not considered intelligent enough to be trusted with the enjoyment of even such harmless imagery as

"There is a tide in the affairs of men Which taken at the turn leads on to fortune."

During all the three hundred years since those lines were written, probably no illustrator of Shakespeare's plays ever felt called upon to draw a picture of that tide, and probably no actor ever strove to represent it on the stage by voice or gesture. But in De Mille's photoplay "Male and Female," where the passage is quoted, the lines on the screen must be accompanied by a photograph of surf, which was evidently intended to represent the tide!

Shakespeare's poetic image was thus killed by a single shot. But it sometimes take more ingenuity to destroy a charm. Take, for instance, this descriptive line from "Evangeline":

"When she had passed, it seemed like the ceasing of exquisite music."