This chapter tracks the movement of melodrama as a rhetoric through the adaptation of new technological devices to the needs of enlarged and more effective effects on the big motion picture screen. From the Victorian stage to early silent era moving picture shorts, moving pictures are here considered a century apart. From Way Down East (D.W. Griffith, 1920) to Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, 2014) popular moving pictures testify to the resilience of the cross-cutting editing technique that so spectacularly displays melodrama’s narrative requirement that suffering be met by action. The argument is that every cinematic technique is also a melodramatic device: the tracking or travelling shot, slow and fast motion, the zoom in and the cut to the close-up as well as the freeze frame, descendant of the tableau vivant. Further, moving picture melodramatic effects rely on a wide range of unlike signifiers each governed by different codes and conventions – the tableau vivant summary pose, the framed composition, the blue-tinted night sky, the insert cut away within the scene – a new mixed repertoire at the disposal of the earliest crossovers from the Victorian stage.