Historical

Since the invention of film at the end of the 19th century, film makers have looked to books for inspiration on storylines. The below video is an early example of a book being adapted into a film as French director Georges Méliès adapts the Cinderella story.

What we can infer from this video is that the human aspiration to visually adapt written stories dates back to the creation of cinema.

With the adaptation of texts into plays even earlier, it can even be said that it is a need of the human mind to want to represent words via images.