Page:Pictorial beauty on the screen.djvu/24

 Hugo Riesenfeld, have made exhibition itself a new art. They select pictures with conscientious taste, place them in a harmonious program, and show them in a theatrical setting that gives the right mood for æsthetic appreciation on the part of the audience.

Publicity men, too, have felt the temper of the public. Although they still like to exploit sensational features, the language of art is creeping into their "dope." They are beginning to find phrases for the kind of beauty in a film which does not come from a ravishing "star" or the lavish expenditure of money. And the independent reviewers whose criticisms are published in the newspapers and magazines have become professional. There was a time when they contented themselves with listing the cast, revealing the plot in a paragraph, and adding that "the photography is excellent." But now we find thoughtful, discriminating criticisms of photoplays in the film magazines and in the leading daily papers of the country. These critics have learned how to analyze the narrative as a dramatic construction, and how to evaluate the interpretation of character in the acting, but they have also learned something else, and this belongs to the new epoch in the development of the photoplay; they have begun to observe the pictorial art in motion pictures, the endless possibilities of beauty in the pictorial combination of figure, setting, and action; in the arrangement of lines and masses, of lights and shadows, and in the fascinating rhythms of movement on the screen.

This conscious desire for beauty on the screen, which is springing up all along the line, from the producer to the ultimate "fan," has naturally led to public discussion. In school room and church, on "lot" and