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THE FILM EXPERIENCE
by Roy Huss and Norman Silverstein
CHAPTER TWO
Continuity
How did early film makers discover what was right for the screen? They knew
that in arcades pictures of Sandow the Strong Man would entice a penny from boys who
wanted to see him flex his muscles. They knew that the excitement of seeing motion
actually reproduced on film attracted crowds. They showed filmed vaudeville sketches
and magic shows because crowds loved vigorous and exotic physical activity. Eventually
two kinds of film would dominate the screen: the peep show and the chase. As primitive
tribes described them to Hortense Powdermaker, "kiss-kiss" and "bang-bang" stories are
right for the screen
What was right is right: peep shows and chases still attract audiences. The lure of
the peep-show element is its forbidden or private nature. When a character is about to go
to the race track, the director shows him changing his trousers as he receives a tip on a
horse. A girl going out with an older man against her mother's wishes, as in Joseph L.
Mankiewicz' Letter to Three Wives (I948), is putting on her stockings and straightening
seams while she argues with her mother. The gaudy bathing scenes in films by Cecil B.
De Mille are examples of the peep show made lavish. The kinds and settings of chases
are abundant. Cowboys chase Indians; hunters chase animals (and vice versa); cops,
robbers; indignant citizens, monsters; aquanauts, fish. Chases take place through fire, in
outer space, under water, along the rim of the earth. Rooftops, deserts, marshes with
patches of quicksand, roller coasters, merry-go-rounds, the sides of skyscrapers and
ledges, the Statue of Liberty (Hitchcock's Saboteur, 1942), Mount Rushmore (his North
by Northwest, 1959)
,
ice floes (D. W. Griffith's Way Down East, 1920
,
and Andrzej
Wajda's Ashes, 1965), frozen lakes (Sergei Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky, 1938
,
and Gian
Luigi Polidoro's To Bed or Not to Bed, 1964), around giant clocks (Harold Lloyd), and on
top of locomotives (Buster Keaton's The General, 1926)--these have all been settings for
chases. For farce the chases could be speeded up; for melodrama, as in dreams of
helplessness, slowed down. The precision with which the director was able to reproduce
the tempo of athletes chasing each other or a ball or of dancers following each other in a
chorus line made the baseball story and the musical right for the screen. Even Alain
Resnais' Last Year at Marienbed (1962) uses peep shows and chases, in this instance for
the surrealistic expression of complex ideas about time, memory, and social alienation:
the camera pursues through lonely corridors, analogous to the avenues of the mind, the
identity of a moment of time. Film makers have the ability to think creatively in terms of
moving pictures. The peep-show and chase elements can be so attenuated that sublime
thought and complex feeling overshadow the vulgarity that at one time seemed to
dominate the screen.
Although right for the screen, peep shows and chases are, in a sense,
protonarrative elements. Simple movements in film, like the cow boy mounting his horse,
the gangster driving into a filling station and performing a hold-up, dancers kicking high
in a chorus line, and soldiers charging out of trenches--all kinesthetic actions--must in
fictional films also serve to advance a story. Brutal actions or excruciatingly slow tortures
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reach the nervous system of the spectator in horror films and in war stories with patriotic
or pacifist intentions. The essence of storytelling in cinema lies in the fact that pictures
and sound will be used to show characters "doing and suffering," as Aristotle says, and
either changing their environment or being changed by it. With picture and sound, the
cinematic storyteller exhibits a single unified plot through which he affects the emotions
of the moviegoer and enables him to participate in a ritual such as, for example, theater
and poetry are thought always to provide.
The making of a movie may begin with a story idea, presented by an agent to a
potential producer. The producer may then assign scriptwriters to compose a scenario, or
working script, but before the director begins the film, he often prepares, or has an artist
prepare, a "story board." A storyboard is concerned, however, with more than story or
plot; it is the director's attempt to outline his story pictorially stage by stage. It consists of
a “book" in which he pastes drawings of char deters in various locations. Below each
picture he designates which stage of the story this represents or the dialogue that
accompanies it and whether the shot will be most effective as a close-up, middle shot, or
long shot (as well as any other feelings about the camera setup that occur to him). He
may note which shots are to consist merely of stock footage to be taken from the studio
library.
The storyboard artist, guided by the director, captures the actions and passions that will
be translatable into film, varying throughout the camera distances and angles that will
evoke surprise or pathos. Even though his series of drawings is accompanied by written
actions and dialogue, the continuity, reminiscent of action comic strips, remains primarily
pictorial. After the film is shot according to the plan of the story board, the film editor,
sometimes with the director or the producer or both, undertakes both the final cutting and
the assembling of the film-strips into the whole.
In fictional films the word story is therefore not quite accurate. Story belongs to
the phases before production when film makers in conference describe in words to one
another what they will show on the screen, or when they write summaries of their plots as
story ideas, scenarios, and scripts. It refers a]so to the narratives we tell one another after
we have seen a film, as well as to postproduction scripts like the published versions of
Ingmar Bergman's screenplays or the one of Tony Richardson's Tom Jones. As the
storyboard suggests, a film maker tells his "story" through a succession of shots.
Therefore, more accurate than story is the word continuity, which acknowledges that
picture and sound grouped together as shots, rather than written words alone, are the
means of cinematic storytelling. A film is made ordinarily in segments, not necessarily in
its final shot order. The director's task is to make each shot as good as he can and later to
assemble all shots into an effective order, to give the film its continuity.
As an example of continuity we could use any film, but let us take a "classic," James
Whale's Frankenstein (1931). Its excellence cannot be judged solely by Mary Shelley's
novel or by Boris Karloff's impersonation of the Monster or by its theme or camera work.
The chief criterion is Whale's skill in mounting a collection of shots that contain pictorial
accords and oppositions. Other criteria, though necessary for the full cinematic
experience, are encompassed within this key factor, since they are contributions to the
total narrative effect.
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Whale opens with pictures of a cemetery at night: in the first shot, the camera travels
across a misty area covered with dark foliage; it discovers a grave and a body being
buried. The director tries to arouse fear by the sound of earth falling on the coffin, by a
lap dissolve to the completed grave and by a shot of its subsequent reopening by Dr.
Frankenstein and his hunchbacked assistant. Among the mise en scene (details of setting)
are a hanging, swaying skeleton in a medical lecture hall; surgical instruments used for
dissection--shown in close-up; disembodied brains, one marked "normal," the other
"abnormal," the topic of a medical lecture; Dr. Frankenstein's private laboratory, and
particularly a table, on which a sewn-together body, the sutures visible on its neck and
wrist, is raised toward an open roof to receive lightning that will generate life in it.
Finally, the fluttering eyelids of the awakening Monster signal the awesome climax of
these terrifying sequences.
The camera angles are sharp; scenes are rarely photographed from normal angles of
vision. The pan shot becomes a source of fright--what new horror will the camera
discover?--as when the camera pans from a child playing with flowers to bushes in which
we see the enlarged eyes of the approaching Monster.
When Whale shoots daytime scenes, ablaze with sunlight, or restores normal camera
angles, his obvious purpose is to provide contrasts with the horror to come. Bavarian
peasant dances in costume, supposedly representative of simple mountain life, are
interrupted and intercut with the horror of the Monster and a child dropping flowers into
a lake and watching them float. Later the child's father interrupts the gaiety, as he carries
the dead girl across the sunlit square.
In addition to establishing horror by details of mise en scene and by contrasts,
Whale complicates the emotion we feel by including details that arouse pity for the
Monster, so that we cannot entirely triumph in his destruction. The Monster is shown to
share with fellow humans a fear of fire, the element that ultimately destreys him. He
arouses our pity when he is bound in a cellar and whipped or burned by Dr.
Frankenstein's assistant, Fritz. He also appears to have a capacity for love and pleasure,
as in his playing with the child and the flowers. His face as shown in the close ups that
alternate with middle distance shots sometimes appears to be troubled, for he cannot
understand the world he lives in or his own motivations.
The Faustian theme, perennial in science fiction, is that of a scientist's successful
attempt to recreate life in dead bodies. It carries the anti-intellectual lesson that there are
areas of knowledge in which man has no right to experiment. The wise man, according to
this theme, leaves unanswered certain questions about the source of life. James Whale,
happily, omits the church ending usual in such films---the sermon which concludes that
some questions are the province of God. Instead, he is content to have given us a
continuity of shots which lead us from suspense, to terror, to pity.
While it is true that the film maker has verbal means at his disposal, the filmgoer
expects him to tell the story largely in terms of moving pictures. A moviegoer will be
tolerant of words, but grows bored when the pictures are not the primary means of
storytelling. As Erwin Panofsky points out, the "price the cinema has to pay" for visual
storytelling is that both actions and inner states of mind, or philosophy, must he
"spatialized.
”
Hamlet can say he is going to England, and the playgoer is content. In a
film, however, the director must show the passage of time, making time visual, that is, by
making objects move in space. Fox example, after a character says he is going to Los
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Angeles, the filmgoer expects to see an airplane in flight or some familiar Los Angeles
landmark coming into view. The film maker shows the passage of time not only with the
legend “Argonne Forest, 1918” but also with the physical action of cannon firing or
troops leaving trenches to fight. Words are not enough. The passage of time must be
shown through changed spatial relations---an object must change its position in relation
to its background or to the limits of the frame. In like manner the moviegoer is not
content to have a scene remain static or frozen for any length of time. If objects,
architecture, or any aspects of setting are immobile by nature, the spectator at least
expects the camera to move in relation to them, or he hopes to view them from different
distances and angles in a series of dynamic "cuts."
When a moviegoer remains preoccupied with dialogue, remaining literary-conscious
rather than shot-conscious, he ends by looking at a window as if it were a wall. Consider
the ways in which the art of the film is both different from and similar to certain literary
genres in the way it fashions a story. Between movies and the stage there are fundamental
differences which go to the heart of each medium. In theatre the basic division of action
is the scene, whether determined by a particular selling or time span, or, as in the French
style, by the entrance or exit of characters. In a film, however, the fundamental unit is the
shot, or single camera operation, a great number of which may actually combine to form
a "sequence," that is, in the stage sense, a scene. For example, in the theater two men may
talk in a law office in a scene taking twenty minutes. In a film, on the other hand, this
same scene might consist of a sequence of fifty shots. The first might be a middle shot of
the two men in profile facing each other, the second might focus on the face of the first
man and the back of the second, the third might be a close-up (or detail) of a coffee cup
on the desk, and so on
Good film makers compose sequences out of such a variety of shots not merely, as
many believe, for the sake of giving a continual flow of fresh sensations to the eye of the
spectator. Their main aim is to heighten visual perceptions of meaning, feeling, and form.
In the law office scene the camera cuts to the face of the speaker or listener whose
outward emotional reaction is more dramatic, and then to the image of the cup to stress
an important--possibly a symbolic--detail. Furthermore, the camera may "look down”
upon one character from above and "look up" to the other from below--this is, as we shall
see, one of the many simple ways in which the film maker, unlike the dramatist, can
directly indicate an "attitude" toward his subject.
Indeed, the possibility of constantly varying the position and focus of the camera plus
the ability to cut rapidly from shot to shot is what most distinguishes the art of the film
from the theater and places it closer to the novel. D. W. Griffith, as a matter of fact,
admitted that he was able to devise two of the most vital elements in the grammar of
film--close ups and cross~cuts-- only after a careful study of Dickens. One need merely
glance at the opening pages of Great Expectations to see that a fluid "camera point of
view" is operative: a middle shot of the cemetery moves into a close up of the
gravestones, and then pans the landscape in long shot. Later Dickens provides a
"subjective" camera view of the swinging church steeple when Pip is turned upside down
by Magwitch. Since craftsmanship delimits emotion, such devices--varying camera
distances and point of view--in both Dickens and Griffith often actually control what
appears, on the mere narrative level of their work, to be undisciplined sentimentality¸
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Like the novelist, the film maker is free to manipulate time as well as distance and
space. Violations of normal time sequences, as in the "flash back" and the "flash
forward," and alternations between parallel actions are of course possible in the theater,
but protraction or compression of a scene by restructuring its fragments is not. Let us say
it takes an actor in reality ten seconds to cross a room (or stage). A film editor can
condense this to three seconds by "jump-cutting" from the initial segment of the action to
its concluding segment. Or he may prolong the time by joining together a series of
"overlap" shots; that is, each of several shots of the action (from different angles) will
repeat part of the distance covered in the previous shot. Another way of extending time is
to represent serially the simultaneously occurring details of an action, as Eisenstein does
in the famous Odessa Steps massacre in Potemkin (1925) when he "analyzes" the tableau
into details of Cossacks' boots and the wheels of a runaway baby carriage, along with
reaction shots of an old woman with glasses and of a mother with a dead child. Both
"overlapping" and "analyzing" impose a view and rhythm of experience quite different
from the order of actuality, or that of the stage.
From this it can be seen that the further one penetrates to the heart of cinematic
structure and movement the nearer one comes to discovering something that is very much
like poetry. Intercutting or juxtaposing shots of different material (what Eisenstein calls
"montage") sets up visual similes and metaphors, as in a poem. A famous example is the
way in which Eisenstein in Strike (1924) intercuts shots of a bull being slaughtered with
details of the brutal handling of a mob. Sometimes a close-up of an object can make it a
poetic symbol, as the stress on hands tends to do in Frank Perry's David and Lisa (1962),
and the repetition of a device, like the "zoom-freezes" of the face of the dead father in
Tony Richardson's Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) or the "wanted"
posters in Francois Truffaut's 400 Blows (1959), creates a type of rhyme or refrain.
The recognition of such poetic elements in a film is ultimately the only valid way
for a moviegoer to be "literary-minded." Should he praise the story of The Last Laugh
(1924), he should also point out how the sense of the old doorman's tragedy is enhanced
by the gradual shift of the camera angle from low to high, or how photographing him
through the hotel’s perpetually revolving door reveals the fast tempo of the world which
will crush him. Every movie sequence is like a deck of picture cards, and the significance
of a film experience lies in the arrangement of shots. The alert filmgoer who is interested
in story must become shot-oriented, aware of moving forms and moving camera, of
angles, of contrasts between foregrounds and backgrounds, of playing areas of the screen
in which actors are placed.
Cinematic continuity also requires a pictorialized cause-effect relationship. E. M.
Forster says of fiction that the sentence, “The king died, and the queen died,” is a story;
but that the causal statement, “Because the king died, the queen also died," is a plot. In
order to convey a simple story in pictures, without words, the film maker must show the
king, perhaps on a bed, with a servant closing his eyes, and then being borne to a tomb.
But how can he show the plot? Perhaps the same three could be intercut with the queen
looking forlornly at the bed where the king is lying, and then in tears as the servant closes
his eyes, and finally dejectedly walking in his funeral procession. Then the queen can be
shown to die by means of the same sequence of three shots with parallel settings and
camera movements. In a novel or play words are sufficient, and sometimes in a movie
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they are satisfactory. But the moviegoer expects to see actions and the chain of reactions
they set off rather than exclusively to be told about them.
As Francis Fergusson points out, all dramatic action is primarily that of the psyche or
soul. This is what novels and plays share with film. Although the stories in film genres
like the western and the thriller are, of course, less exalted than the work of Sophocles,
simple quest stories often involve the action and reaction of the psyche. The western hero
avenging his father's death or Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) in John Huston's The
Maltese Falcon (194I) seeking his partner's murderer advances through suspense-making
physical and moral adventures toward a confrontation and a denouement. The episodes
through which he proceeds cannot be reversed, as in episodic plots, which lack causality;
once Sam Spade learns of the murder of his partner and announces that a detective whose
partner's murder is unsolved is allowing something that is "bad for business," he cannot
be deterred from his work in spite of "the Fat Man" (Sidney Greenstreet), Peter Loire,
Elisha Cook, Jr., or Mary Astor; he may seem to become interested in the money and the
adventuress, but his purpose goes by the most direct route to its fulfillment. As in
Oedipus Rex, the plot in The Maltese Falcon follows a causal sequence during which a
series of probable events leads to the confrontation of all the possible murderers and to
the denouement, at which Mary Astor, rejected by Bogart, rides down the elevator in
police custody, the bars of the sliding elevator door casting shadows on her face, as if she
were already in prison,
Probability within a causal sequence remains the chief feature of any good plot. The
organic nature of continuity requires that probability--the necessity that what is most
likely to happen in given circumstances, rather than what is freakishly possible, should
happen--be maintained throughout a film. Foreshadowing is both a fictional and a
cinematic device that elevates the merely possible to the probable. Because it is now a
historical fact, the assassination of President Kennedy is of course "possible," but from
the point of view of art it is "improbable." When Bruce Conner gives the event a
continuity he gives it probability.
In order for an event to be probable in art, the audience requires knowledge, or hints,
of antecedent actions and motivations of character. For example in Carol Reed's The
Third Man (1949), pictures of a cat licking a boot in a doorway prepare the moviegoer for
the knowledge that Harry Lime (Orson Welles) is alive, Without such preparation, the
"resurrection" of Lime would be improbable. In Citizen Kane (1941), which turns on the
question, "Who is 'Rosebud'?"--Kane's last word--the meaning is subtly planted before
the probable denouement. The snow scene in the glass ball that the dying Kane drops
after he utters the name "Rosebud" is followed in a later sequence by an actual snow
scene in which the boy Kane is playing with his sled. When the boy, who is reluctant to
leave with Thatcher, hits the older man in the stomach with the sled, the viewer glimpses
the trade-mark of a rosebud on the sled, (Orson Welles, as director, is careful, however,
not to reveal the written word Rosebud, which is also on the sled, until the end of the
film.) As the boy leaves his farm, a long, detailed shot shows the sled piling up with
snow, its trade mark and name again hidden. As the boy later unwraps a Christmas
present, he rejects the gift of a sled—it is not Rosebud. These visual clues, known fully
only in retrospect, make the film's continuity probable. At the end of the film, the sled
with the name Rosebud burns among the effects left behind by Kane, signaling the detour
in Kane's life that has taken him from his mother s boarding house, where he might have
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flourished emotionally. It is as if Kane as a boy knew intuitively what was best for him,
and as if his parents and guardians were working against his nature, or psyche, to convert
him to what he could not be.
The film maker has cinematic means not only for establishing but also for reversing the
probable line of a film's story, especially when he wants dramatic irony. For example,
when Kane is running for political office, his success is threatened by his opponent's
having discovered him to be keeping a woman in a love nest. Kane's powerful personality
and his assertion that he will win anyway arouse the confidence of the audience. Still the
viewer knows, from previous accounts of the Kane story, that in politics Kane is
"destined to be a bridesmaid hut never a bride." However, the director, Welles, follows
the shot concerned with the love nest with a close-up of a newspaper headline: "Kane
Elected." Since important events of a film's plot are conventionally shown in newspaper
headlines, the audience for the moment expects that Kane has won. But Welles at this
point draws the camera back from the headline to reveal that the news sheet is still in the
press that of the lnquirer, owned by Kane. The increased camera distance also reveals
Bernstein reading this headline and saying of another headline, “Kane Defeated, Fraud at
Polls" (that we also see), "l guess we'll have to print that one." Kant has lost the election,
in accordance with the audience's original expectation, which has been temporarily
reversed. Thus Welles establishes a probable story and toys with its ironic reversal, using
an increased camera distance to effect it.
The cinema has been so varied in creating such reversals, the basis of one
important kind of excitement in filmgoing, that advertisers frequently use the word
"suspense" to urge filmgoers into theaters. Suspense in the movies is conventionally
thought to lie in chases, as when the good men ride after the cattle rustlers, who seem to
be momentarily triumphant. The intercut, from one group to another, or, in a fist fight,
from one antagonist to the other, is the usual method for delaying the outcome of the
action. But a film maker has other means to make us expectant of what the camera will
find. When Kane's mistress suffers through her operatic debut at the Chicago Opera
House, the camera reaches, like the singer after her high note, toward the upper parts of
the house. It passes from the singer on stage upward past the flies and comes to rest on
two stage hands on a catwalk, one of whom comments on the quality of the singing by
holding his nose.
All techniques in cinematic storytelling that prolong the time of an action create
suspense, as we have seen in our examples of an increased camera distance (the
newspaper headlines), of the crane shot (in the opera house), or of the intercut (as in a
conventional chase). Suspense delays the logical consequence in the development of a
causal sequence. Time, however, must not be prolonged to the degree that it interferes
with the unified whole, overtaxing the attention span of the audience. Proportion requires
that time be prolonged, but not distorted. Boredom results from such disproportion. When
the camera does not locate the center of interest or when it dwells over insignificant or
meaningless detail, not connected to the continuity, the filmgoer will be tempted to leave
the theater.
Sometimes, however, the material found by the searching camera only appears to lack
significance or is of such an order of thought that it merely seems meaningless. Those
addicted to causal sequences of action films sometimes find the stress of an avant-garde
director whose shots do not fall into a conventionally logical pattern to be without one.
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Agnes Varda's Le Bonheur (1966) seems merely to repeat instances in which a man feels
happiness, as he walks among flowers, surrounded by the wife and children or the
mistress he loves. He sleeps, he makes love; and all the props stress a happiness in
simplicity. The conflict in the film lies in what is unstated. While all the images prepare
the filmgoer for accepting a conventional happiness, the theme that emerges from the
succession of "happy" scenes is that the "happy" life is not worth living. All the
insignificant materials are, in fact, part of a causal sequence whose suspense lies in the
spectator's gradual awareness that what he is seeing is, in fact, deplorable: the
denouement, the suicide of the wife and her replacement by a mistress who will become a
second wife of the happy man, does not lead the hero to self-knowledge, to an awareness
of a false ideal. The spectator, left however with a set of shots that convey a complex
philosophical thought, must supply to the images received the principle that organizes
what he has seen.
Cinematic devices enable a plot to be told in a continuity of shots, but they also
enable the film maker to show probable people performing the actions of the plot. Since
the configuration of the plot is in fact determined by how characters act and think, the
film maker must find cinematic devices for delineating them. He has, of course, verbal
and narrative means at his disposal--dialogue, sketches by other characters, and the like.
The film maker, however, is also a pictorial artist who can use the distortion techniques
of the caricaturist for sharpening character: a close low-angle shot of Sidney Greenstreet's
stomach in The Maltese Falcon emphasizes the fat man's overpowering greed; the
famous low-angle long shot of Jedediah (Joseph Cotten) through the towering legs of
Kane in the foreground establishes the tyranny of the latter over the former. In these
instances the director is using actors as props in order to reveal the personalities of the
characters they portray. He may also highlight the performer's acting talent in close shots
that make the human face an instrument for conveying inner feelings. Sensuality is,
perhaps, the easiest emotion. It may be conveyed by wet, parted lips. In Erich von
Stroheim's Greed (1924) Tina bites her own forefinger or glows ecstatically over gold
coins to show the sublimation of her sexual passion into miserliness. In silent films
emotions tended to be conventionalized in what we may call libretto acting: shyness
conveyed by a finger at the chin or villainy by a face contorted into a snarl or the twirling
of mustaches. Such gestures were broad. Characterization may lie in less obvious
arrangement of the actor's features, as in the enigmatic face of Garbo that ends Rouben
Mamoulian's Queen Christina (1933) or Robert Mitchum's highlighted eyebrows as he
calls the children hiding in the cellar in Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter
(1955): "Children! . . . I can feel myself gettin' awful mad, children." In October (1928)
Eisenstein simply cross-cut Kerensky and a peacock to characterize the interim leader of
the Russian Revolution,
A remarkable fact about thc history of screen stories is that in sixty years the
medium has found essentially nonverbal methods of presenting plot, character, and
thought, elements that function organically in a unique art form. Using pictures
exclusively, Andrzej Wajda can ask a pbilosophicaI question. In Samson (1961), the story
of a Warsaw Jew between I939 and 1944, the hero follows the procession of Jews being
marched to the ghetto. Still outside, he sees a wooden fence being constructed; the other
Jews are behind it. The following shots (Fig 4) show the fence in construction The last
shot of the sequence will show the final board hammered into the fence with a little cross
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on the corner. The question Wajda asks by showing the shape of the cross that becomes a
confining wall concerns the responsibility of Christians toward Jewish martyrs--an
abstract thought, potentially a cliche, is thus presented nonverbally, and yet is an
eloquent, passionate pictorial statement.
The cinematic storyteller, as we have seen, has at his disposal pictorial means for
presenting plot, character, and thought; his "diction" is likewise pictorial, in spite of
words used in the intertitles of silent films or the spoken dialogue of talkies. The source
of this diction is reality: whatever motion is capable of being photographed and
subjected to manipulation in the cutting room, where strips of film will be cut and
spliced, the sounds mixed, and the music adjoined. If successful, the film will have a
unity of action, as well as a temporal and spatial order. The effect on the spectator will be
the same as that of all art, rightly perceived. His emotions will be engaged by continuity,
characterization, thought, and picture, all working together in an aesthetic harmony.