Page:Pictorial beauty on the screen.djvu/88

 *herdess, because the almost vertical line of her body forms a cross with the horizontal line of the sheep's backs. Yet the design is so subtle that, unless we stop to analyze, we do not notice how the painter achieves his emphasis. We do not notice that the front of the woman's body is really a continuation of the left edge of a tree which extends to the top of the frame, that her profile is the continuation of a line of foliage from another tree, that her staff makes right angles with her throat and with the back of her head, that the rhythmical contours of a sheep flow into her left hand and arm, and that a shadow from the lower center of the picture leads to her feet.

If a painter establishes his emphasis so carefully in a picture which the beholder may regard for hours at a time, it would seem all the more urgent for a cinema composer to study out the correct emphasis for a pictorial moment which the spectator must grasp in only a second or two. It is extremely important, for the simple reason that, if the director does not deliberately draw the attention of the spectator to the dramatic interest in the picture, it is most likely that accident will emphasize some other part, as we have seen in the examples already discussed; and then, before the spectator has time to reason himself away from the false emphasis to the true interest, the action will go on to some other scene, and a part of the real message will be lost.

Let us illustrate this again by turning to another "still" from "The Spell of the Yukon," facing page 57. The thing which attracts first and longest is the strange object in the upper left-hand corner. On