Proseminar Blog

 

In his foreword to The Art ofPhotoplay Making (The Macmillan Company, 1918), one of the first thingsthat Victor Freeburg does is put his book in conversation with the few previouslypublished books that took up film as a serious object of study: namely VachelLindsay’s Art of the Moving Picture(1915), Epes Winthrop Sargent’s Techniqueof the Photoplay (1916) and Hugo Munsterberg’s The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916).  In the latter book, one of Munsterberg’s goalswas that film be recognized as an artistic medium.   Whether we owe it to Munsterberg or not,today we largely take it for granted that film is (at least capable of being)art; Freeburg takes it as a given only two years after Munsterberg’spublication, shifting the focus from why film is art to how.  Thus his goal in The Art of Photoplay Making was twofold: (1) to educate the makersof photoplays on how to make superior photoplays, and (2) to educate the masseson how to appreciate photoplays as they would any other fine art, thus creatinga more discriminating viewer who would demand the superior photoplays whoseartistic worth he espoused.  When he setsout aesthetic rules, e.g. that the image must be compositionally balanced, he’sbeing both descriptive (of an aesthetic ideal that viewers should look for) andprescriptive (of an aesthetic ideal that filmmakers ought to strive for).  And while Munsterberg largely eschewsaesthetic judgments on the quality of individual films, Freeburg makes suchjudgments throughout his work.

Like Munsterberg (and most early film theorists), Freeburg wasforced to rely on comparisons between film and the established arts (such astheatre, painting, music, literature and sculpture) throughout his discussionof how to improve the artistic stock of the newest art.  As I was reading Freeburg’s work, I was concurrentlyreading Munsterberg, so I was acutely aware of the similarities and differencesbetween their work, and will cite these comparisons as relevant.

 

Usually a discussion about an historical figure such as Freeburg isgoing to begin with some biographical information, but such detail aboutFreeburg is quite sparse: the man’s work is mostly forgotten and is not citednearly as often as Munsterberg’s.  VictorOscar Freeburg was born in 1882, a fact that I could only discover usingConcordia’s library catalogue but could not confirm elsewhere.  Freeburg’s degrees were from Yale and hisPh.D. was completed at Columbia, where he wrote his dissertation on “DisguisePlots in Elizabethan Drama.”  In 1915,that dissertation was published as a book and in June he was appointed to theEnglish department at Columbia.  Afterteaching English during the summer session, he was appointed in the fallsession to inaugurate a new course being offered by the university’s extensionprogram, Photoplay Composition. (Extension courses did not count towards the completion of degrees, butwere rather offered either as after-hours courses for both matriculatingstudents and non-matriculating adults, or as distance education courses.)  Despite the course’s somewhat marginal statuswithin the institution, Photoplay Composition is nevertheless significant (forus film scholars) for being the first course to bring what was generallyconsidered a “low culture” art (one need only look at Munsterberg’s hesitancyto even step foot in a theatre) into the Academy.  This course was a big step forward for thecultural acceptance of film as art and its significance ought not beunderestimated.  For more detail onPhotoplay Composition, refer to the first chapter of Dana Polan’s Scenes of Instruction, from which Iquote the following course description:

 

Thiscourse is concerned with the methods of preparing dramatic plots, old and new,for the motion pictures.  The photoplayis studied as an independent art of dramatic expression, in some respectsinferior, in others superior, to the stage play.  Special attention is paid to the art ofarousing and maintaining interest, the proper dramatic arrangement of incidentsand situations, the various methods of delineating character, the effective useof mechanical devices, and the pantomimic and pictorial qualities of a goodphotoplay.  Films will be exhibited andanalyzed before the class, and visits will be made to the studios offirst-class motion picture companies. Each student will be required to write finished, technically correctscenarios of at least one adaptation and one original screenplay. (46)

 

Freeburg taught Photoplay Composition a total of six times atColumbia between 1915 and 1919, though the course continued to be taught in hisabsence for some years afterward.  (Referto Peter Decherney’s article (Inventing film study and its object at ColumbiaUniversity, 1915-1938” for a reproduction of Freeburg’s teaching record.)  OnJuly 1, 1917 he resigned from Columbia to join the U.S Navy for the remainderof World War I, only to be reappointed to teach Photoplay Composition once morein the summer session of 1919.  It wouldseem that he put the finishing touches on his first book about film, The Art of Photoplay Making, during histenure with the Navy, as his author’s foreword is signed January 1918 from theU.S. Naval Training Camp in Pelham Bay Park, New York. 

 

Without lecture notes or any other primary documents to go by, The Art of Photoplay Making is the bestplace to look to get a sense of what ideas were being circulated in Freeburg’sPhotoplay Composition classroom.  As headmits in the foreword, “Some of these ideas, I have, in fact, alreadyexpressed publicly in a series of lectures delivered at Columbia Universitybetween” 1915 and 1917.  The book isaimed directly at the two audiences upon which the achievement of hisearlier-stated goals depends: that is, aspiring and practicing scenario writers(what are today called screenwriters) as well as laypersons and casual and avidcinema-goers who want to cultivate a more refined aesthetic taste with regardto moving pictures.  Per its description,the Columbia course seemed to have been aimed purely at the former group.

 

Before discussing the ideas put forth in his books and pedagogy,let’s remind ourselves of Freeburg’s context with regard to classical filmtheory: Munsterberg’s book, which is usually considered the first text of whatwe now refer to as Film Studies, was published in 1916 (also the year of hisdeath).  Freeburg began teachingPhotoplay Composition the year priorto the publication of Munsterberg’s book (i.e. Freeburg was teaching filmconcurrent to Munsterberg’s discovery of the medium), but Freeburg’s book isn’tpublished until two years after Munsterberg’s death.  A few years later in 1923, Freeburg refinesand elaborates his theories of what constitutes the proper cinematic aestheticin a second book, Pictorial Beauty on theScreen (also published by the Macmillan Company).  This book speaks to a continuing interest infilm even after his tenure as instructor of Photoplay Composition at Columbiawas over, and it contains some interesting revisions of material from his firstbook that will be discussed later.  It’sanother ten years after the publication of VF’s second book before we getRudolph Arnheim’s Film as Art in1933.

 

Like Munsterberg, you could say that part of Freeburg’s mission wasto rescue the cinema from its reputation as a mute, flat and monochromaticsubstitute for the stage.  The idea thatfilm was fundamentally worse than theatre was not acceptable to Freeburg, whospends much of his book defending and measuring film’s medium-specific traitsagainst similar traits in the established arts (theatre, painting, music ,sculpture, prose and poetry).  He calledfor media to be judged on its own terms, rather than on the terms of other(preceding) arts.  (Refer to the firsttwo paragraphs of The Art of PhotoplayMaking for a good summation of this view.) Much of Freeburg’s work is thus devoted to in-depth discussions of whatfilm can and can’t do, and then, once that’s established,what it ought and ought not to do.  Once we know the limitations of the art form(or, as Freeburg would prefer, the traits that make the medium unique fromother arts), we are capable of determining how to make films that exploit themedium to its fullest potential, rather than merely attempting to replicate whathas worked in other media on film.  Totake the latter approach is not likely to result in “good art,” or specificallyin the “pictorial beauty” that Freeburg cites as the highest goal of thecinema. 

 

Films qualified as art for Freeburg based on the followingcriterion: “if the numerous parts that go into a photoplay can be welded by thefire of genius into a harmonious whole, the result may be a piece of art” (Art 5). While his aesthetic philosophy is devoutly classicist (or you could say“anti-modernist,” given that he was applying the pre-modern principles ofbeauty to the very modern(ist) art of cinema), he also seems ahead of his time:the basic principles of his criterion, that many parts work in harmony toproduce a film’s form, is essentially what guides the formalism of Bordwell andThompson’s Film Art, which remains acornerstone of countless Introduction to Film classes.  Here, Freeburg is also in line withMunsterberg, who viewed the piece of art as complete in itself, isolated, inperfect harmony and thus leading to a feeling of complete satisfaction for thespectator.

 

As I mentioned earlier, Freeburg is writing for two audiences: forwriters, who would hope to learn the tenets of good cinema in order to applythem in their own work, and for cinema-goers, who would hope to learn to betterappreciate cinema on an aesthetic level. Freeburg saw that one of the issues that cinema-goers faced is theproblem of “the crowd,” which he separated from the concept of “thepublic.”  For Freeburg, a movie-goingaudience inevitably formed a crowd, which he saw as detrimental to theexperience of the film as art.  Even badfilms (like bad politicians, he notes) are capable of swaying a crowd withtheir immediate sensory and emotional appeal. But the crowd has a fleeting, ephemeral engagement with the film thatdisappears once the film is over and the crowd has dispersed (and once thecrowd has dispersed, you’re left with individual members of the public).  The public, on the other hand, defines thecollective opinion of the free-thinking individuals that make up society,uninfluenced by the effects of the crowd that we would now callgroupthink.  To sway the public, a filmwould have to have lasting beauty,would have to hold up to repeat viewings and close analysis, would have notonly what Freeburg calls primary appeals (that is, appeals to the senses andthe emotions, in that order) but also secondary appeal, which is to theintellect.  For Freeburg, being part of acrowd heightened film’s capacity to appeal on the aesthetic and emotionallevels, but lowered its capacity to appeal to the intellect.  The nature of exhibition and groupthink leftlittle room (or time) for the aesthetic contemplation necessary to fully appreciategood art.

 

As you might suppose, Freeburg is primarily focused on aesthetics inboth of his books (exclusively so in the second book), because he viewed film’saesthetic appeal as its strongest attribute. This might seem strange, given that his primary audience is aspiring orpracticing scenario writers, who traffic not in images but in words that onlywill later be adapted into images—and by somebody else at that.  But for Freeburg, it was the scenario writerwho was the true author of the film, which he called “thecinema-composer.”  The term is a tip ofthe hat to the writer of music, who wrote out the musical composition but didnot himself perform or conduct it—the analogy would place the director in therole of conductor and the actors in place of the orchestra.  (It’s interesting to note here that by 1923,Freeburg had reversed his position and attributed to the title of“cinema-composer” to the director, who he then saw as the true author of afilm.  Curiously, in the few discussionsof Freeburg’s work that I was able to find, nobody recognizes thisreversal.  I’ll discuss this a littlemore later, towards the end of discussion.) 

 

The scenario writer, then, as the person responsible for the rawmaterial out of which a director would stage the photoplay, is also responsiblefor the creation (or at least enabling the creation) of pictorial beauty.  Because the film’s most fundamental appealwas to the eye (then the emotions, followed by the intellect in a distantthird), the scenario would have to contain those elements which would result inpictorial beauty.  (The writer would haveto be aware of how the elements of a scene would work together pictorially tocreate a harmonious image, would have to visualize the images in his/her mindas s/he wrote.)

 

All of this begs the question, what does Freeburg consider‘beautiful’?  For Freeburg, “if you havea sense of satisfaction when you look upon a picture, and if the satisfactionremains when you look upon it long or again, or dwell upon it in memory, thenthat picture to you is beautiful... [A] cinema picture is beautiful whensubject and composition together put the spectator in a state of contemplativesatisfaction” (Art 28).  How to create this “state of contemplativesatisfaction” is the complicated part, which Freeburg devotes the majority ofhis two books to.  Freeburg will also bemore specific and slightly revisionist about his definition of beauty in hissecond book, which I’ll get to in a moment.

 

Freeburg devotes much of his writing on film to the issue ofphotographic composition.  Obviously,there are analogues to be made between film and other arts here, specificallypainting, and Freeburg compares the composition of many film stills withpaintings, usually privileging the painting as artistically superior in itscomposition.  He wasn’t detracting fromfilm’s ability to match the beauty of painting, but rather was pointing outmeans by which film could learn compositional lessons from the masters ofpainting—because the same rules of composition applied to both (this is his classicism/anti-modernismshowing).  For instance, on page 79 of Pictorial Beauty on the Screen hecompares a still from Polly of the Circuswith the Frans Hals painting Banquet ofthe Officers of St. Andrew, noting how the painting seems to contain alarger crowd than the film still, even though the opposite is true.  This is because of the use of space in thepainting, which, he writes, treats each head “almost as though it were aseparate portrait.”  Each head “seems tohave plenty of room to move freely without bumping,” causing us to overestimatethe crowd, whereas the film still has “bodies huddled together in a meaninglessjumble”; “no interest is significantly framed [and] no two interests areproperly spaced” (Pictorial 58).  The director here has actually inflated thebudget of the picture by using more extras than he needed to, resulting in apoorer composition and less pictorial beauty. 

 

The principles that ought to have been followed in this example arethose of spatial economy.  In Pictorial Beauty on the Screen, Freeburgtied beauty in film to two related principles: (1) the economy of theimage—which is to say that the image shouldn’t strain the eye with informationthat doesn’t support the narrative: “pictorial beauty economizes the work of theeye and brain, while visible ugliness does not” (Pictorial 42)—and (2) that pictorial interest coincide withnarrative interest, which is to say that as the narrative gains interest, sotoo should the images.  In short,pictorial beauty was very much synonymous with pictorial efficiency.  “The pictorial beauty discussed in this bookis really a kind of pictorial efficiency, and therefore must have practical,economic value [Freeburg thought that beauty should cost less to produce thanugliness - DJ].  When a motion picture iswell composed it pleases the eye, its meaning is easily understood, and theemotion it contains is quickly and forcefully conveyed.  In short, it has the power of art” (Pictorial 10).

 

He had many “rules” that ought to be observed in order to avoidugliness, most of which were based on classical ideas about how we look atimages.  The eye is naturally drawn, forinstance, to contrasts of light vs. dark, so the filmmaker ought to use thesecontrasts to emphasize the main point of interest in the composition, becauseif the strongest contrast between light and dark draws the viewer’s attentionto something insignificant in the image, it is an unsuccessful composition(such as that featured on page 28 ofPictorial Beauty); other things thatnaturally draw our eye include right angles, strange objects (that require usto spend more time looking at them just to figure out what they are), and thelongest line in the image.  All of these,Freeburg writes, compel our attention towards a certain part of the image, sothe creators of the images ought to be aware of them and use them to focus oureye toward the primary object of interest in a shot, rather than someinsignificant detail.  Compositions thatoveruse sharp contrasts of light and dark, or too much movement within theframe, strain the eye and are thus “ugly” and inefficient compositions.

 

Interestingly, Freeburg also speaks out against camera movement incompositions that contain figure movement within the frame.  This, he writes, results in visual confusionand a false sense of figure movement, as the viewer cannot discriminate betweenthe movement of the frame and the movements within the frame.  He does approve and endorse the use of mobileframing to make static compositions more dynamic (e.g. the pyramids).

 

Carefully planned compositions were especially important in thephotoplay, wrote Freeburg, because the images are not accessible in perpetuity,like paintings hanging on a museum wall. With a painting, we can afford to spend several minutes exploring thenuances of the background detail after we have gotten the gist of the mainfocus; in the photoplay, the images are only available for our gaze for afinite period of time, and if our eye is temporarily drawn away from thenarratively important information in a shot, that information might be gonebefore we get to it.  Painters spend alot of time making their compositions perfect: he called for cinema-composersto do the same.  For Freeburg, “the bestcinema composition is that arrangement of elements in a scene which enables usto see the most with the least difficulty and the deepest feeling” (Pictorial 19).

 

Freeburg devoted separate chapters in his first film book to staticcomposition and “fluent” or moving compositions.  Obviously, most compositions in cinema arenot going to remain perfectly still, but he defends the attention on stasis byappealing to our collective tendency to remember images—even moving images—instill moments.  He asks his reader, “Tryto recall the pictorial aspects of the action in a play you saw years ago.  What do you recall?  Moments or movements?  Rarely a movement, more often a moment”; “Doyou not remember certain instants, certain tableaux, more vividly than thetransitions or movements between these tableaux?” (Art 31). 

 

Freeburg implicitly connects static and moving images with the ideaof rhythm, which he applies to both.  Therhythm of a still image refers to the quality of the movement of the eye as itscans the image, so it is determined by the composition of elements within theframe and what those elements are.  Animage that guides your eye across it in a smooth, curved line could be said tohave a smooth, legato rhythm while an image with a lot of jagged lines andsharp contrasts (between objects and/or shades of black/white) would have amore staccato rhythm to it.  Rhythm inmoving images has to do with the figure movement within the frame and the paceat which shots are edited together (a process that he aptly labels “cutting andjoining”).

 

He makes a distinction between beautiful subjects and beautiful art,noting that a true artist can create beautiful art out of an ugly subjectthrough their skilled treatment of it. This, he argues, is not possible in the cinema, because the camera eyedoes not afford the filmmaker the same degree of artistic control that paintand canvas do.  Thus, in order to createpictorial beauty in the cinema, one must begin with beautiful subjects, andthen proceed to frame them among the other mise-en-sceneelements in a way that lends them even greater beauty. 

 

Of course, Freeburg also recognizes that some images are morebeautiful “in movement than in repose” (Art63) and that the cinema is particularly adept at bringing out the naturalbeauty of movement.  Some images fromnature that he cites as containing an inherent “fluent beauty” are “the pouringrush of a waterfall, the rhythmic undulations of the sea, the fan-likespreading of a sky-rocket, the slow curling or smoke from a factory funnel, thevarying balance of a bird in flight, the steady forward thrust of a yacht underfull sail” (Art 12). 

 

Like right angles, strange objects and sharp contrasts of light anddark, movement is another element of a composition that will naturally attractour attention, and thus must be used carefully in a frame to draw the viewer’sattention.  Freeburg uses the example ofa character seated, still, who is the main narrative focus, while a fire dancesin the fireplace on the other side of the frame.  The viewer will be more interested in theflames, which provide greater visual interest than the girl.  This is why filmmakers need to “harmonize[the] pictured motion with the meaning of the play” (Art 64) rather than have it for its own sake, where it mightdistract the viewer from more significant visual information. 

 

Motion is just one attribute of many that define cinema against theother arts.  Another is its ability touse the nature.  Like Kant, Freeburg sawa great deal of beauty in nature that art failed to capture; for him, “Art isart, not because it reflects some actual bit of nature, but because it isendowed with some beauty made by man” (Pictorial87).  This is not to say, however,that the arts shouldn’t draw upon the beauty of nature, but rather that natureisn’t the yardstick of beauty against which art should measure itself.  Freeburg always says that what is beautifulin art is a product of man’s intervention with nature (an echoing ofMunsterberg’s non-mimetic view of art).  Films,then, should draw upon nature in to create pictorial interest by staging scenesin naturally beautiful locations: this is a luxury that film has which,Freeburg is quick to point out, the theatre lacks. 

 

Setting is particularly important in the photoplay because we’realways aware of it.  Unlike in a novel,where we don’t necessarily visualize the setting of a scene while we read it,the setting of a film is always in view. And like everything else in the film, the setting should “harmonize withthe story” (Art 151) rather thandistract the eye without purpose.  Herails against the filmmaker who, on his way to a location, passes a beautifulwaterfall and insists on filming the scene there simply because it is beautifuland in spite of the fact that the waterfall might be either narrativelyinsignificant or incongruous.  Whilenature offers its beauty to the filmmaker, he has to avoid the temptation todraw on this resource needlessly.  Natureis so beautiful that it can draw the viewer’s attention away from what isimportant in the scene, like the example of the fireplace earlier.  The pictorial interest of two people talkingis dwarfed by that of a waterfall, so don’t stage your boring dialogue scene infront of a waterfall!

 

If you’re familiar with Munsterberg, you’ll recall that one of thereasons why he was so interested in the cinema was how it replicated the humanmind’s ability to remember and to imagine, by using what he called “cutbacks”(what we now call “flashbacks”) and by creating expectations that result insome imaginative play on the part of the spectator.  Freeburg takes the idea of imagination andexpands upon it—though who’s to say whether his ideas are a response toMunsterberg’s or an anticipation of them, given the obscure timeline of thecirculation of these ideas.

 

For Freeburg, the primary means by which film engaged theimagination was through its images.  Atthe time (and for some years afterward), critics tended to bemoan the cinema’stendency to “leave nothing to the imagination,” to show rather than tell—thesepeople would prefer youths to read a good book rather than go to the pictureshow.  But Freeburg saw more potential inthe cinematic image, writing that “while science and machinery starve theimagination, art [including the cinema] sets it free” (Art 91).  Offscreen space,for instance, has an inherent appeal to the imagination; figures in silhouetteor out-of focus do likewise.  What isshown onscreen is not always the complete image, so to speak. There are alwayselements just beyond the frame and even within it that the mind has toconstruct for itself.  Also, the factthat the pictures were silent held a great deal of imaginative potential forFreeburg.  Unlike pantomime, in which thecharacters played by the actors were themselves dumb, film was full ofcharacters that spoke, but we could never hear their words.  There’s a great deal of imagination involvedhere, as the viewer has to necessarily put words into their mouths, has toimagine the dialogue—the viewer becomes a writer, becomes actively involved inthe construction of the story. Characters that are shown thinking give us the opportunity to read intotheir psychological states, to project onto them using our own imaginations. 

 

The final subject that I’ll discuss with Freeburg is his position onthe use of words, subtitles and intertitles in the cinema.  In no uncertain terms, he was againstthem.  For instance, he wrote that “thehistory of the development of aesthetic taste shows the same abhorrence forhybrid art [that nature shows for hybrid animals or interspecies]” (Art 166).  Thus the filmmaker that relies on intertitlesto make his narrative clear is not unlike H.G. Wells’ fictional vivisectionistDr. Moreau, who creates hybrid species by giving human characteristics tonon-human animals by means of painful and unnatural surgeries.  Freeburg was against the mixing of media(certainly he would have hated the playful interaction of words and images incomic books), and believed that words were only permissible in photoplays when theywere an “organic” part of the mise-en-scene (e.g. a filmmaker would be allowedto show a letter that a character receives, but not to write a conversation outusing intertitles, because the words that we see on the screen in the latterscenario aren’t a natural part of the mise-en-scene). 

 

“The ethics of picture narration demands that the pictures beself-explanatory and establish their own coherence” (Art 215).  Words had to be subordinate to the images, rather than coordinate, and were only to be usedwhen the possibilities of pantomime to express an idea were exhausted. 

 

As for sound, Freeburg doesn’t concern himself with it terriblymuch.  He notes that at some point in thefuture, the technology may allow for the coordination of synchronized soundalongside the photoplay, but at the time of his writing, silence was aninherent part of the ontology of cinema, and it was an integral part of itsdefinition as an art.  Silence set thecinema apart from the theatre, and this not only didn’t make it inferior forFreeburg, but actually had its advantages because of its appeal to theimagination. 

 

Despite being one of the first voices to speak authoritatively onfilm form, Freeburg’s contribution to early film criticism is now largelyforgotten.  Nevertheless, we shouldacknowledge his work among his contemporaries, like Munsterberg, for itsoriginality and “ahead-of-its-time-ness.” Like Munsterberg, Freeburg presents a kind of proto-auteuristperspective on film authorship that could have well served as a template forAstruc’s theory of the camera-stylo. While Munsterberg wrote of the “photopoet” as the author of a film,writing in light on celluloid rather than ink on paper, Freeburg presents uswith the figure of the “cinema-composer,” a title that he bestows upon thescenario writer in his first book, which was aimed at scenario writers; but asI hinted at earlier, he later changed his mind and called the director the“cinema-composter” (this is in his second book, which seems more aimed atdirectors).  In fact, in this second bookhe displays a complete turnaround with regard to the role of the writer.  Whereas before Freeburg earlier advised thewriter to include as much detail as possible in his scenario, he laterinstructs the writer to be as vagueas possible with regard to everything except for “the general action” of apicture—a complete 180˚ shift from his earlier view.  Both Freeburg and Munsterberg seem totheorize that authorship is an essential precondition of art, and Freeburgcites the director as the unequivocal “master” of the film, just as thecomposer is the master of his music. 

 

Freeburg was also instrumental in leading the charge ofmedium-specificity with regard to film. Even while making constant allusions to other types of art, he neverbemoaned what cinema couldn’t do, but rather celebrated what he viewed as itsinexhaustible potential for pictorial beauty and artistic expression.  Today, he seems very much a proto-formalist,with his insistence that every element of film form function in a harmonioussystem to create a coherent work of art. (Refer to the last two paragraphs of PictorialBeauty for Freeburg’s vision of “an ideal photoplay.”)

 

And of course, we mustn’t forget that Freeburg was also a pioneer ofearly cinema instruction, having taught the first ever cinema-centric class, atColumbia University in 1915. 

 

Bibliography and Further Reading

 

Azlant, Edward.  “Screenwriting for theearly silent film: forgotten pioneers, 1897-1911.”  FilmHistory 9 (1997): 228-256.

Decherney, Peter.  “Inventing film studyand its object at Columbia University, 1915-1938.”  FilmHistory 12 (2000): 443-460.

Freeburg, Victor Oscar.  The Art of Photoplay Making.  New York: The Macmillan Company, 1918.

Freeburg, Victor Oscar.  Pictorial Beauty on the Screen.  New York: The Macmillan Company, 1923.

Polan, Dana.  Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of theU.S. Study of Film.  Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 2007.

 

 

 

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