CHAPTER IX
PICTORIAL MOTIONS AT REST
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 restfulness, which is broken only
when the top wakes up and begins to wabble.
Now one trouble with the movies is that they often wabble when they ought to spin. The motions in the picture too often lack a center of balance, a point of rest. All of us have been annoyed by excessive motions, jumbling, clashing, on the screen. But many of us have also, in lucky moments, been delighted by sudden harmonies on the screen, when the pictorial motions, without slowing up in the least, were conjured into a strange vital repose. And afterward, when we recalled the enthrallment of such moments, we became optimists about the future of cinema art.
Surely this is one of the characteristic appealing things about a motion picture, that it can show us motions doing the work of pictorial expression, indulging in rhythmic play, and yet suggesting a dynamic repose. Thus the youngest art can give us in a new way that "stimulation and repose" which, psychologists say, is the function of all arts. The painter who can suggest movement by means of fixed lines, masses, and colors is no more of a magician than the
