Page:The Educational Screen - Volume 1.djvu/25

to emphasize its purpose as it should not be if a compromise, for art’s sake, between the theoretical ideal and the practical exception, is to be maintained.

Pictorially, too, these foreign mobs appeared to have been more adequately rehearsed. The reel might have been stopped at any point and, within a common sense latitude of judgment, would have presented a picture falling within the laws of line and curve, light and shade, and proportionate masses in balance, the theory hinted at by Vachel Lindsay, and bizarrely carried out, via lines of dynamic force, in the Caligari film with its perspective of depths.

The American film mob bunches. A real mob does? Very well, but no art can afford to carry its realism beyond certain tendencies of standardization. No art can make license of freedom.

No art has ever held the limitless future of achievement that the “movies” hold. But they are a pictorial medium and must adhere to some of the age-tried tendencies of what, in pictorial art, has pleased the keenest of human judgments. The modern writer, thanks to the century’s alertness for deeper meanings, has thrown aside “rules of composition,” but he still remembers that his readers demand logical reasons for effects and recall, longest, that which, fundamentally rears itself from certain definite and immovable tendencies in all good writing. So with the photodrama. That it is pictorial action does not alter the case.

Why was Carnival a great picture, so great that, in company with two others, it led Americans into unfair criticisms of their own work?

First, the pictorial value of Carnival’s mob scene, interior as well as exterior. It was the most exquisite I ever witnessed. It had endless detail and movement (helped somewhat by the awkward panorama) yet blended into a quality that reflected the delicate texture of Venetian abandon, never thick enough to become debauchery, never rough enough to become vulgar. This atmosphere was the heart and end of the whole film, and, in the individual, became a trait that determined the heroine’s action up to the minute of climax.

Had the mob scene been less of a study of the effects of light and shade and mass, the thick impression would have reached the public, necessitating title effort (art and sub) to readjust the false atmosphere. In itself, so clumsy a method is unforgivable. Moreover, we are dealing with an art of pictures, not words; the latter must be cut to the minimum.

From another viewpoint, pictorially, Carnival was remarkable. The much mooted question of darkened stages in legitimate circles carries an analogy in films. Shall the action in pictures be so much a part of the set that it blends as a pictorial detail of the set? The next few years will see a choice made, perhaps develop two schools. Carnival represents, to the writer, the more desirable one.

Carnival was not obsessed with “bunch calciums”! The sets were lighted