DICKENSf CINEMATIC TECHNIQUES: I>===l THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN DICKENS ' NOVELS AND THE LANGUAGE AND CONVENTIONS OF THE CINEMA

ii Dickens ' imagination is strongly visual and the visual art it most closely resembles is film. We find, in his work, narrative techniques and methods of characterization which actually anticipate the development of film aesthetics. Sergei Eisenstein, the founder of the principles of film montage, WaS the first to draw attention to this cinematic imagination which Dickens possessed ~ in his essay "Dickens, Griffith and the film Today " in film form. It is the function of the first chapter of this thesis to document, more fully than Eisenstein, these cinematic techniques. D.W. Griffith, who has been called the creator of film language, claimed that he was influenced by his reading of Dickens ' novels. His study, he said, allowed him to develo