The twelve years between The Great Train Robbery (1903) and The Birth of a Nation (1915) might be the least known years in all of movie history. Yet it was during these years that the idea of what constituted a movie evolved from brief, simplistic snippets viewed through coin-operated 'peep shows' to ambitious, feature-length projects with complex storylines and characters.

Any number of early pioneers during this period are worthy of examination—animators Émile Cohl and Winsor McCay; Mack Sennett, producer of the Keystone comedies; special effects artists such as Segundo de Chomón and Wladyslaw Starewicz; Alice Guy and her experiments with synchronized sound; American Mutoscopes's industrial films and documentary footage—but far and away the most influential and indispensable figure of the early era was director D.W. Griffith.

If you only know David Wark Griffith as the director of The Birth of a Nation, it's entirely possible that you've shunned his work entirely, out of principle, moral revulsion, or a general sense that it's musty and irrelevant. The breathtaking scope of that film's racism (it sparked riots upon its initial release and can still inspire protests) has overshadowed everything else Griffith has ever done. And while any discussion of Griffith's work must address his controversial legacy, too often the discussion has ended there.

The fact is, without Griffith, what we today think of as movies would not exist. He introduced storytelling techniques—the close-up, the flashback, cross-cutting between multiple locations and storylines—that are so commonplace now, you almost forget that someone had to invent them.

Griffith was born in Kentucky to Confederate colonel 'Roaring Jake' Griffith and Mary Perkins. He had aspirations of being a Broadway playwright, took small acting parts in movies for the money then switched to directing when he discovered it paid better. He directed his first movie, the twelve-minute short The Adventures of Dollie, in 1908 working from instructions written out on a single sheet of shirt cardboard by his cinematographer G.W. 'Billy' Bitzer.

Over the course of the following five years, Griffith directed just shy of five hundred movies, mostly for the Biograph Company located in New York City.

Like every other director of that era, Griffith wrestled with the problem of narrative—how to tell a story in a silent medium—but whereas other directors simply parroted the techniques that worked on stage and wound up with actors in togas milling around in front of painted backdrops, Griffith grasped from the outset that film presented its own unique set of problems and opportunities.


First and foremost, Griffith was a director of action—war, westerns, crime—and was the first director to realize that conveying it convincingly required more than just motion but editing as well, to juxtapose simultaneous events, and in the process create excitement and suspense.

To see an example of what I mean, check out An Unseen Enemy, one of 22 short films that are part of the two-disc D.W. Griffith - Years of Discovery 1909-1913 collection available from ClassicFlix. The story is a simple one—thieves break into a secluded country home and terrorize two girls (the legendary Gish sisters in their screen debut) while their brother and the police race to their rescue—and other directors of the era would have chosen to set the entire movie in a single room with, at best, a glimpse of a burglar peeking in at the window and the rest of the cast standing awkwardly in the frame waiting for their cue.

Griffith instead shows the brother putting money in a safe, cuts to a housekeeper eavesdropping from the next room, follows the brother out of the house, cuts backs to the housekeeper attempting to open the safe herself, then cuts to a man at a roadhouse who receives her phone call and plans a robbery. Soon the sisters are trapped in the house while the thieves work in the next room. The sequence of shorts alternate between the sisters, the thieves and the brother, including one of the best-known shots of Griffith's career—a pistol barrel appearing through a passthrough to threaten the terrified girls—culminating in a thrilling rescue led by the brother and a posse of policemen.

In the same DVD set, in such short films as The Girl and Her Trust, In the Border States and The Battle at Elderbush Gulch, you can see Griffith developing and honing the basic elements of the action film, elements included in every thriller made thereafter. Think about that: movies as great as North by Northwest, Die Hard, The Lord of the Rings or as bad Smokey and the Bandit owe something to D.W. Griffith.

And if Griffith had accomplished nothing else during his career, he would still be considered one of the greatest directors of the era. But he also used editing and camera movement to underscore the dramatic impact of his stories. The Country Doctor, for example, a short from 1909, opens with a panning shot, moving across a valley to a house where a doctor, his wife and their child are already emerging from the front door to walk straight toward the camera, establishing with a single uninterrupted camera movement both the story's setting and the identity and socio-economic status of its characters.

By itself, this shot was more sophisticated technically than anything I'd seen in the twenty years of film that proceeded it. But when Griffith reverses the same shot at the end of the film, to pan from the now empty house where the doctor's child has just died back across the valley where you know nothing is ever going to be the same, it's heartbreaking, maybe the first time a director had ever broken his audience's heart.

It's the sort of sequence we take for granted now but which pretty much didn't exist before Griffith. That he was able to conceive such a shot only a year into his career as a director underscores just how quickly he raced ahead of his competitors in using film to convey emotion.

Even more advanced for the time was Enoch Arden. In that story of a wife waiting for her husband's return from the sea, Griffith uses cutting not just to show the same action from different points of view as in An Unseen Enemy, or even to establish that the action is simultaneous, but to show parallel storylines linked only by the emotional resonance between them. Griffith cuts back and forth between the two—the shipwrecked sailor and the wife who waits—for the remainder of the film, showing the analogous plights of the castaway and his (presumed) widow as they each struggle to survive.

Most subtle of all, Griffith used composition, close-ups and finally what is known as continuity to focus his audience's attention on certain details to create particular moods.


(The Gish Sisters with D.W. Griffith)
For example, A Corner In Wheat, one of five Griffith films preserved in the National Film Registry, uses the composition of the figures in the frame to underline just how long the odds are against the victims of an economic swindle. Lone figures confined to the corner of the screen, overwhelmed by empty vistas, conveying through image alone the desperation the characters feel, could have come straight from an Edward Hopper painting—except that A Corner In Wheat pre-dates Hopper's breakthrough as an artist by some fifteen years.

The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912), movie history's first gangster movie, uses composition to focus the audience's attention in a different way, with a technique known now as 'follow-focus'—the practice of having the camera operator keeping moving actors in focus while allowing the background to go out of focus. At a time when cameramen prided themselves on keeping the entire frame in focus, Griffith's longtime cinematographer Billy Bitzer was reluctant to follow Griffith's direction in this instance and only acceded to his request after Griffith took him to an art museum to look at paintings where the foreground subjects were in sharper focus than the background. (Indeed, Griffith got many of his ideas while strolling through New York's museums.)

And while Griffith didn't invent the close-up, he did use it for the first time to show emotion on his actors' faces at critical moments, a technical innovation that allowed them to adopt a more subtle acting style, eschewing the dramatic poses of the stage for something more reserved, which Griffith thought played more effectively on the screen. The change was incremental, and sometimes you can see both styles in the same scene, but when compared to other films of the era, the difference is striking.

In 1914, Griffith made his first feature-length film, Judith of Bethulia. Based on a book from the biblical apocrypha, Judith is the story of a beautiful young widow who sacrifices her own sense of virtue to seduce the leader of an invading army and save her people. Aside from its place in film history as one of the earliest feature-length films produced in America (the rest of world had been producing feature films since 1906), Judith of Bethulia features an early example of what is known as 'classical continuity editing' or 'classical Hollywood narrative'—the practice of cutting within a scene to make clear to the viewer at all times where the characters are in relationship to each other and to their surroundings, both in terms of the physical space and the chronology of the film story.

A good example comes early in the film. Griffith starts with a wide shot of seated figures threshing wheat, holding on them until Robert Harron enters the screen from the left and crosses to the far right where he sees something in the distance. Griffith then cuts to a medium shot of Mae Marsh at a well, back to a wide shot to establish where she is in relation to her surroundings, then to the medium shot again to show Marsh's face as she struggles with the water jug. Griffith cuts back to the wide shot as Robert Harron enters from the left then cuts on his act of helping Marsh to a medium two-shot so you can see Marsh's face as she reacts to his kindness then finishes the scene with a wide shot as the couple walks off the screen, holding on the empty screen until someone else enters to draw water at the well.

The use of classical continuity editing—as opposed to the then-typical practice of having all the actors remain on screen in the same full shot throughout the scene, what David Bordwell calls the 'tableau' style—became the industry standard by 1917. (Currently unavailable on DVD, Judith is begging for a proper restoration. Beat-up public domain copies circulate on the internet.)

Although a critical success, Judith of Bethulia was extremely expensive to film and Biograph declined to finance Griffith's further ambitions in this direction. As a result, Griffith struck out on his own, taking his film crew and troop of actors with him.

At his new studio, Mutual, Griffith followed up Judith with another near-feature-length film, The Avenging Conscience. Not as well known as Judith of Bethulia but perhaps even better, The Avenging Conscience was based on Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Tell-Tale Heart' and is a taut psychological drama involving love, obsession, murder and finally madness. Griffith's technical expertise is on full display here, with parallel compositions used to convey parallel emotions, and an increasingly frantic cutting style that anticipates Eisenstein's use of montage a decade later.

Would somebody else have eventually stumbled across the same techniques that Griffith developed during the Biograph years? Well, maybe. But Griffith figured out how to tell stories at a moment when the long-term commercial viability of cinema was still in question. The Lumiere brothers had bailed, Reynaud had thrown his camera into the Seine, Melies was about to go bankrupt and Edison would soon sell his studio, all because they couldn't make movies work financially. Sure, movies had a guaranteed short-term novelty appeal, but so did the hula hoop. There's no guarantee they would have been around long enough for someone else to figure out the things Griffith did.

Ultimately, Griffith's reward for showing the world how to tell stories on film was to find himself left behind by filmmakers who used his techniques to tell better stories. To a great degree, this was his own fault. As you watch Griffith develop a film language, you can also see him develop the bad habits that would ultimately cost him his audience—his reverence for an outdated Victorian value system, his obsession with female virtue, particularly when Lillian Gish takes over the lead acting chores from Mary Pickford, and an appalling tendency in his Civil War films to sentimentalize, or worse justify, America's brutal system of racial apartheid—vices which have not only dated badly in our 21st century eyes, but which began to alienate audiences as early as the end of the First World War.

Stuffed with fluff with buttons for eyes, the Mythical Monkey writes about classic movies as often as a blog-typing sock monkey can. Check out his website, A Mythical Monkey Writes About the Movies.