CHAPTER IX

PAINTING-IN-MOTION

This chapter is founded on the delicate effects that may be worked out from cosy interior scenes, close to the camera.  It relates directly to chapter three.

While the Intimate-and-friendly Motion Picture may be in high sculptural relief, its characteristic manifestations are in low relief.  The situations show to better advantage when they seem to be paintings rather than monumental groups.

Turn to your handful of motion picture magazines and mark the illustrations that look the most like paintings.  Cut them out.  Winnow them several times.  I have before me, as a final threshing from such an experiment, five pictures.  Each one approximates a different school.

Here is a colonial Virginia maiden by the hearth of the inn.  Bending over her in a cherishing way is the negro maid.  On the other side, the innkeeper shows a kindred solicitude.  A dishevelled traveller sleeps huddled up in the corner.  The costume of the man fades into the velvety shadows of the wall.  His face is concealed.  His hair blends with the soft background.  The clothing of the other three makes a patch of light gray.  Added to this is the gayety of special textures:  the turban of the negress, a trimming on the skirt of the heroine, the silkiness of the innkeeper’s locks, the fabric of the broom in the hearthlight, the pattern of the mortar lines round the bricks of the hearth.  The tableau is a satisfying scheme in two planes and many textures.  Here is another sort of painting.  The young mother in her pretty bed is smiling on her infant.  The cot and covers and flesh tints have gentle scales of difference, all within one tone of the softest gray.  Her hair is quite dark.  It relates to the less luminous black of the coat of the physician behind the bed and the dress of the girl-friend bending over her.  The nurse standing by the doctor is a figure of the same gray-white as the bed.  Within the pattern of the velvety-blacks there are as many subtle gradations as in the pattern of the gray-whites.  The tableau is a satisfying scheme in black and gray, with practically one non-obtrusive texture throughout.

Here is a picture of an Englishman and his wife, in India.  It might be called sculptural, but for the magnificence of the turban of the rajah who converses with them, the glitter of the light round his shoulders, and the scheme of shadow out of which the three figures rise.  The arrangement remotely reminds one of several of Rembrandt’s semi-oriental musings.

Here is a picture of Mary Pickford as Fanchon the Cricket.  She is in the cottage with the strange old mother.  I have seen a painting in this mood by the Greek Nickolas Gysis.