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separate plays. There was little these ladies did not know about the technique of screen writing, and in Alfred Hitchcock they found an eager and attentive pupil.
    He also learned a lot, even at this very early stage, about the possibilities the film medium offered for manipulating material. The story in silent films was of course told in pictures and words—the words of the titles. And what the young Hitchcock soon had brought home to him was the degree to which one could lie with pictures, or rearrange and reinterpret them to make them signify almost anything you wanted them to. A scene shot as drama could, if it did not come off, be re-cut and re-titled to come out as comedy: the filmmaker was sovereign in his own little world, the world he created first by shooting the film and then, even more decisively, by fiddling about with the pieces, laying them end to end first this way and then that. Their significance, he learned, was only relative: you could direct the audience into doing the work, seeing and understanding things just the way you wanted them to, could fix things so that they noticed this and disregarded that. And actors were merely counters in this game of chess—they might be more or less well designed for their purpose, but finally they were only counters, taking on significance from the way they were moved around in the course of the game. And this practical lesson came, be it noted, some three years before Kuleshov carried out his famous experiments with audience-manipulation by juxtaposing shots of various apparent stimuli with the same neutral shot of an actor registering as nearly as possible nothing.
    All the same, it is unlikely that the films made by Famous Players-Lasky in Britain at Islington during the years 1920-2 were very lofty works of cinematic art. There is no way of knowing for certain, since they have all disappeared. But George Fitzmaurice was considered one of the better directors in Hollywood at the time, and Donald Crisp had a certain aura as the erstwhile assistant ofthe great D. W. Griffith, whose
Birth of a Nation
and
Intolerance
were foremost among the films which had seized the teenage Hitchcock’s imagination. And it was a time, we should remember, when despite the inroads that these two Griffith films in particular had made on the prejudice of cultivated people against this upstart fairground side-show the cinema, few filmgoers and perhaps even fewer film-makers gave much thought to the possibility that this might be an art they were dealing with.
    In 1919, the year Famous Players-Lasky British was set up,
The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari
was being made in Germany, the first film to dramatize the incursion of the intellectual avant-garde into cinema there. In Hollywood Erich von Stroheim was directing his first film,
Blind Husbands
; Chaplin had just made
A Dog’s Life
and
Shoulder Arms
, and was in the process of founding United Artists with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D. W. Griffith. In France Abel Gance was making his first real film epic,
J’ Accuse
, and Louis Delluc, first intellectual theorist of the cinema, had published his first book,
Cinéma et Cie
. In Italy the cinema was actually in decline, following its ‘golden age’ which climaxed in the super-spectacle
Cabiria
(1914), while in Sweden a national cinema was securely based on the first major works of Sjóstrom and Stiller, and in Russia the first films of Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Dovzhenko were still five or six years in the future. It was a time, in other words, when much of the potential of the film medium was about to be realized, the beginning of the great period of silent movies, the first suspicions of intellectual respectability and the advent of the self-conscious artist-figure in the ranks of film-makers.
    Alfred Hitchcock was to be by no means unaware of all this, but it should be emphasized that his own formation as a film-maker and first experiences were of a