We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
encouraged to use their own words — any which came natural to them within the emotional framework of the scene.
Here I come to one of my most peculiar peculiarities. I never saw a single 'rush' — never had anything to do with any of the scenes after they were photographed until they were all joined together in their proper order with all the titles and sub-titles in place — in short, the whole thing completely finished. I am not asking you to believe that this is a good plan: I am quite sure it was good for me.
To me it seemed, before I started to photograph a picture, that the whole thing stood up before me as a kind of misty mosaic for which I had to construct the various little pieces to be fitted into it afterwards. It had in my mind a kind of balance which I dreaded to disturb. I felt that if I had physical sight and knowledge of these little pieces as they were finished — bits of the concrete mixed up with what was still abstract — the balance of my mental conception would be upset; I should lose my sense of proportion.
I realise that all this may appear very egotistical, even conceited. I don't care. I am writing this book for my own pleasure and I am getting a great deal of pleasure in chewing the cud of my past endeavours. I am not hoping that it can give anything like that pleasure to you, though I feel very flattered that you should have persisted so far with it. But I think that an autobiography must at least be honest in attempt, apart from what it may achieve in actual fact, and that it is up to the reader to cull from it what he can of interest or information or whatever it may be that he is hoping for and forgive the rest. If I try to hide anything under the bushel of affected modesty it will only spoil my pleasure and add nothing to yours.
I will admit that this stoical refusal to see any 'rushes' of my films, or to look at any finished sequences, was heroic self-sacrifice which was very difficult to bear, for I am only human and never was any man more keen than I to gloat over his work the moment it was born.
I see that Alfred Hitchcock, a great producer, has recently been preaching much the same gospel, from the same text; that the proper time to cut a film is at the script stage before ever it is photographed, but I don't think he would be able now to carry it as far as I did. The exigencies of film work with sound must at times call for close-cutting in the after stages. Two figures arguing
138