CHAPTER V.
RHYTHM AND REPOSE IN FIXED DESIGN
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 story of a photoplay. But we
demand something more. We do not get complete
aesthetic pleasure from any composition which merely
contains and reveals something else. The vessel, while
serving to convey its treasure, should have a charm of
its own. In poetry, for example, we are not satisfied
with the language which merely expresses the poetic
content in clear and forceful style. We crave poetic
language, too, words and sentences that sound like
music and that by their very form appeal to our fancy.
In fact most people who have a highly developed taste for pictorial art, consider that beauty of treatment is more important than beauty of subject. Their emotions are stirred by something in the arrangement of the lines, masses, tones, and colors, something that serves other purposes than those of clearness, coherence, and emphasis. What that something is, has always been a great question to students of æsthetics. Mr. Clive Bell, for example, suggests that the essential beauty of art lies in "significant form." But you
