Pictorial Beauty on the Screen

That a moving thing may sometimes seem to be at rest is well known by any one who has ever spun a top. The top spins itself to sleep. We gaze upon it in a peculiar spell of rest...

All the movement which you see on the screen may be enjoyed, we have said, as something which appears beautiful to your eye, regardless of its meaning to your mind. But if that...

Frequently while a director is rehearsing a photoplay scene he will sing out the command, “Hold it!” indicating thereby that the player has struck an attitude, or the players ha...

latter scene is supposed to find her still single or already divorced, but she cannot be allowed to determine her own positions, pauses, tempo and general nature of movement, be...

The production manager of a large motion picture studio in New York once declared to the author that he was “against artistry in the movies because it usually spoils the picture...

Do the movies hurt your eyes? Some say “yes” and some say “no.” Why is it that photoplay scenes sometimes flash and dazzle, but have neither radiance nor sparkle? Why is it that...

Directness, ease, emphasis, unity--these are the things which we have just demanded of cinema composition, the pictorial form which contains, and at the same time reveals, the s...

The end of all aspiring mastery in the movies is to provide for every beholder the thrills of art. These thrills are not like the emotions which are aroused by other experiences...

Pictorial motion is thousands of years older than the motion picture. It is as old as the oldest art of all, the dance. Before man had learned how to weave his own fancies into...

The average matter-of-fact man thinks that artists concern themselves only with copying their subjects, and that their success as artists consists in copying correctly. He is sa...

should consult the current numbers and the volumes for the last five or six years of the “Psychological Review,” the “American Journal of Psychology,” the “Journal of Experiment...

Who is the legitimate master in movie making? It is, of course, the director, and he should take complete command over the plot action of the photoplay, over the players and the...

Vast armies of “movie fans” in massed formation move in and out of the theaters day after day and night after night. They may be trampled on, stumbled over, suffocated; they may...