D.W. GRIFFITH

The basic problem that confronted filmmakers early in the nickelodeon era was that audiences could not understand the causal, spatial and temporal relations in many films. If the editing abruptly changed locales, the spectator might not grasp where the new action was occurring. An actor‘s elaborate pantomime might fail to convey the meaning of a crucial action. Filmmakers came to assume that a film should guide the spectators attention, making every aspect of the story on the screen as clear as possible. So, this problem of narrative clarity was greatly handled by one of the greatest filmmaker D. W. Griffith. After appearing in a string of Porter produced one-reelers, Griffith moves to Biograph where he directs his first film ― The Adventure of Dollie(1908)‖ a blunt remake of Rescued by Rover.He produced and directed hundreds of short films and developed a unique sense of shot composition. For him, the camera should obey the action, not the other way round. He also break the theatrical scene into a series of shots and still preserved the unity of action so that he could increase the dramatic intensity of my films. In many of his films, he introduced the action using establishing shot, then cut to a medium shot for more clarity and go to a close-up for specific detail or dramatic effect. Griffith in particular, explored the possibilities of enlarging facial expressions. In his film The Painted Lady, Griffith places the camera relatively close to the heroine, framing her from the waist up so her slightest expressions and movements are visible. Angry at Biograph‘s reluctance to make feature length films, Griffith leaves the studio for an independent California company Mutual/Reliance –Majestic. He takes his personal cameraman and his entire acting ensemble along for the ride. After several feature-length movies. Griffith is ready to take on his own independent project, The Birth of a Nation(1915). Despite its blatant racism and historical inaccuracies, The Birth of a Nation remains a milestone cinematic achievement. This movie tight narrative would have been even tighter if the NAACP didn‘t force him to cut some scenes out. However, Griffith was pleased with the human aspect of this historical drama, well orchestrated battle scenes, period detail, innovative storytelling techniques such as crosscutting, flashbacks, flashforwardsd, mind screen, fades, masking, irising, tilting, panning dollying etc Cinema finally gains artistic prestige and is universally proclaimed the most powerful medium of expression.Griffith decided to make a grand and extravagant movie. Intolerance (1916) was that movie. Costing nearly forty times as much as an average feature film, Intolerance tells four parallel stories set in four separate time periods. Unfortunately, the audiences don‘t care for Intolerances complexity and grandeur. The movie, although a brilliant example of continuity storytelling, lacks the human touch of the Birth of a Nation. It was a financial disaster and marks the beginning of Griffith‘s decline as the preeminent figure in the world‘s cinema.