Moving Images, Understanding Media

Chapter 7 From Page to Screen 251

Hitchcock, who strove to create precisely illustrated plans

for his fi lms. In this chapter, we will investigate a variety of

creative and collaborative techniques such as these.

Narrative Traditions Applied

to a New Medium

As you have seen throughout this text, motion picture

narratives refl ect dramatic principles learned from and

shared with oral storytelling traditions, short fi ction and

novels, and plays. In the fi rst decade of the twentieth century,

fi lm production outfi ts churned out short movies rapidly

to zip them off to their growing audiences.

Since the movies were short and the fi lmmakers needed

to shoot quickly, there was little compulsion to spend

time preparing for the movies by writing. Literature was a

common source of early cinematic plots, such as the novels

of Jules Verne or classical drama, which functioned well

during production since the creators would be familiar

with their key dramatic moments.

Moreover, with fi lmmakers needing to work quickly

and to craft simple sequences that required little or no

writing, they constantly stole ideas from each other. In fact,

this phenomenon was so extreme that one unit would oft en

directly duplicate a fi lm soon aft er it was made by another

studio. A member of their group would see the movie and

then return to begin shooting their own version of that

movie. Since movies were only a few minutes long, it was not very diffi cult

to reproduce the story shot by shot.

Th ere are two main problems with this. First, it was inevitable that copyright

laws would be established for the moviemaking world so that fi lmmakers

could not simply duplicate the work of another producer. Second, audiences

want to experience something new. Have you ever started to watch or read a

story and rolled your eyes, grumbling to yourself (or the person sitting next

to you): “Oh, that’s so unoriginal, I’ve seen exactly this thing before.”

New Material for Motion Pictures

One director who understood the importance of original narrative was Alice

Guy Blaché. She describes the genesis of her 1906 French fi lm Th e Alcoholic

Mattress in this passage from her memoirs:

Searching for a setting for a fi lm... I [saw] a mattress-maker had

installed her frame for stretching the canvas. She fi nished fi lling it

with wool which she had just carded... and went away for a few

minutes. Almost at once a drunk arrived, climbed the mound and

rested in contemplation before the half-fi nished mattress.

Figure 7-2 Director Alfred Hitchcock,

seated, gestures to collaborators at a

storyboarding conference for the 1940 fi lm

Foreign Correspondent. (Courtesy Wanger/

UA/Photofest)

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