act upon one another in such a way as to rub off their anachronisms and excrescences.
Some years ago I happened to be at Niagara Falls during a convention of one of the great electrical engineering societies. A much advertised part of the program was the illumination of the falls, which I watched from the Canadian side with the full sweep of the “Horseshoe ’ in the foreground. I have never ceased to wonder at the completeness with which this illumination destroyed all the qualities that make Niagara one of the most stupendous and awe-inspiring sights that I have looked upon. And yet this was an occasion which called forth the efforts of distinguished engineers thoroughly familiar with the recent progress of electrical science and anxious to impress the public with the marvelous possibilities of that progress; but they approached this problem from the wrong point of view. They tried to play clever tricks with Niagara, and the only result was to make their cleverness, and incidentally Niagara, look silly and puny.
Theatrical illumination furnishes numberless examples. on a smaller scale, of this same sort of misdirected energy. The lighting of a stage picture requires quite as fine a sense of values as the painting of it; but, as a class, the men who are technically
proficient in matters of electrical illumination are totally lacking in any real appreciation of the artistic requirements of their work. Every one when looking at a painted picture realizes that the shades and shadows are quite as important in the color scheme as the lights, and much of the beauty of modern landscape painting consists in the truthful rendering of the relative values of each color in light and shade, but in stage work, when the scene painting is done and turned over to the management, in nine cases out of ten the effort seems to be to eliminate all shadow, thus losing brilliancy by lack of contrast. As a natural result of this mistaken theory of lighting, the quantity of light is thereupon increased in the vain effort to attain brilliancy by this means and to-day the average stage is lighted to a degree that dazzles the eye and makes ineffective any painting except that rendered in such vivid, crude color as to kill any subtlety of relation between the costumes and the scenery.
The stage director has at hand to-day more clever mechanisms for the production, reflection and diffusion of light than he has ever had before, but in the equipment of most theaters no consideration has been given to one of the fundamentals of stage lighting, which is that the lighting of the actors and the
MAROUF
ACT 2
By ERNEST GROS
Some years ago I happened to be at Niagara Falls during a convention of one of the great electrical engineering societies. A much advertised part of the program was the illumination of the falls, which I watched from the Canadian side with the full sweep of the “Horseshoe ’ in the foreground. I have never ceased to wonder at the completeness with which this illumination destroyed all the qualities that make Niagara one of the most stupendous and awe-inspiring sights that I have looked upon. And yet this was an occasion which called forth the efforts of distinguished engineers thoroughly familiar with the recent progress of electrical science and anxious to impress the public with the marvelous possibilities of that progress; but they approached this problem from the wrong point of view. They tried to play clever tricks with Niagara, and the only result was to make their cleverness, and incidentally Niagara, look silly and puny.
Theatrical illumination furnishes numberless examples. on a smaller scale, of this same sort of misdirected energy. The lighting of a stage picture requires quite as fine a sense of values as the painting of it; but, as a class, the men who are technically
proficient in matters of electrical illumination are totally lacking in any real appreciation of the artistic requirements of their work. Every one when looking at a painted picture realizes that the shades and shadows are quite as important in the color scheme as the lights, and much of the beauty of modern landscape painting consists in the truthful rendering of the relative values of each color in light and shade, but in stage work, when the scene painting is done and turned over to the management, in nine cases out of ten the effort seems to be to eliminate all shadow, thus losing brilliancy by lack of contrast. As a natural result of this mistaken theory of lighting, the quantity of light is thereupon increased in the vain effort to attain brilliancy by this means and to-day the average stage is lighted to a degree that dazzles the eye and makes ineffective any painting except that rendered in such vivid, crude color as to kill any subtlety of relation between the costumes and the scenery.
The stage director has at hand to-day more clever mechanisms for the production, reflection and diffusion of light than he has ever had before, but in the equipment of most theaters no consideration has been given to one of the fundamentals of stage lighting, which is that the lighting of the actors and the
MAROUF
ACT 2
By ERNEST GROS