History

When Griffith initially began directing films in 1908, the average running time for a
typical motion picture was 10 to 15 minutes the length of time it takes for a single reel
to be screened. Occasionally filmmakers were able to produce two-reeler films and,
very rarely, three or four-reel pictures. But the trouble with these films was that
audiences had a difficult time following the extended plots as they silently unfolded on
the screen. Deprived of the ability to speak directly to audiences in a clear, audible
language, movies had to be simple and very straightforward if they were to be
understood. Yet from the very beginning of his career as a director, Griffith dreamed of
making longer, more elaborate pictures that would sustain the audiences interest by
presenting stories every bit as complex and emotionally expressive as those featured in
novels and theatrical plays. However, unlike novels and plays, early cinema could not
rely on the language of words to articulate the twists and turns of its plots and the
thoughts and feelings of its characters. Title cards that spelled out dialogue, ideas, or plot
complications were considered somewhat distracting, and so filmmakers tried to use
these as sparingly as possible.
Faced with this predicament, Griffith set himself to the task of inventing a new
language, a language of images not words, and thus one more appropriate for the silent
medium of film. Griffith soon came to realize that the basic articulations of cinematic
storytelling are not scenes ( la Mlis), but rather individual shots. As we saw in The
Great Train Robbery (1903), Edwin Porter had already begun to cut his scenes so that
each shot was not necessarily coextensive with a theatrically staged scene, where
characters make their entrances, and then fully play out the action of the scene, and then
make their exits -- all before the cut. In Porters fourteen-shot film, he edited a few of his
shots in a new way by cutting in on scenes where the action was already underway and
also by cutting within the scene so as to render it in two or more distinct shots. Porters
experimental editing was somewhat crude, and he used it sparingly in just a couple of
films before abandoning it altogether. But Griffith happened to catch these films, and in
them he heard or rather saw the first stutterings of the visual language he would go
on to perfect. In the wake of his achievements in this regard, subsequent filmmakers
found themselves quite capable of creating bona fide works of art rather than simply
churning out simplistic entertainments for the nickelodeons. By 1914, Griffith had
become fluent in the visual language he had created, and he realized that with it he could
at last begin to produce longer, feature-length films that could match the scope of his
artistic vision.
In what follows, I will spell out some of the specific elements of grammar and
vocabulary that Griffith developed in forging the language of film. For the most part,
these elements correspond to two technical domains of cinematic expression: editing
and shot composition. You will note that many of the specific techniques Griffith
drafted into his language of film had actually been around for a while (e.g., closeups,
tracking and panning shots, etc.), but it was indeed Griffith who began to use these

techniques together in specific combinations and for specific purposes that subsequently
became the cinematic standards which continue to shape our more modern films.

EDITING
Cutting the Scene: Griffith revolutionized the practice of film editing effectively
redefining it for all subsequent generations of filmmakers. Where Porter had sparingly
and cautiously cut a couple of times to break up some of his scenes into discrete shots,
or parts-of-scenes, Griffith took a much livelier hand in cutting up his scenes, typically
shooting different moments of the unfolding action from a variety of different angles and
camera-distances. As a scene unfolds, we might find ourselves viewing the action from
the perspective of a high-angle long shot, and then in the blink of a cut catching a
glimpse of a particular detail framed in closeup, only then to take in the scene again
from an eye-level medium shot perspective. This innovative use of scissors and multiple
camera setups creates an effect whereby the viewer is visually drawn into the scene and
moved around by his or her gaze within it. We are thus seemingly absorbed into the
world of the film as the editing forcefully pulls our eyes now in one direction within the
scene, now in another. Henceforth thanks to Griffith, editing profoundly involves us in
the films we watch. It brings us into the world of the story in a way that theatrical
performances and bedtime reading can only dream of doing.
Continuity and Establishing Shots: Despite his prolific cutting up of scenes, modern
audiences remain for the most part oblivious to Griffiths handiwork in the editing room.
This is because we, too, are now so fluent in the language of film that Griffith forged
that we can speed-read our way through the editorial flow of shots without becoming
confused by the cutting. This is owing to the fact that Griffiths consistent arrangement
of particular shots and cuts has become standardized in modern filmmaking. Following
his example, filmmakers now cut their scenes as energetically as Griffith did, and we
have no trouble following the continuity of visual information as it is shaped in the
editing.
Drawing an analogy between cinematic shots and written sentences, we can immediately
see how the issue of continuity in film editing is crucial for sustaining the coherence of
longer pictures. If a cinematic shot is comparable to a written sentence, it follows that a
scene that is presented through several shots taken from different angles and distances is
similarly comparable to a paragraph made up of several sentences that address specific
aspects of the paragraphs topic. Griffiths intuition was that some of the organizational
and stylistic principles of paragraph composition might then be applicable to the
coherent composition of edited scenes. When we all learned to write paragraphs in
school, we had to master the art of composing topic sentences sentences that offer a
broad introduction to the paragraphs topic and prepare the reader for more detailoriented supporting sentences. Renowned for his voracious reading and his love of
classic literature, Griffith knew all about the structure of paragraphs. The cinematic
equivalent of a topic sentence that Griffith hit upon was something he called the

establishing shot a long shot that provides a broad overview of the scene and reveals
the spatial relationships between characters, objects, and elements of scenery. These
shots usually occur at the beginning of a scene, and the subsequent shots equivalent to
the detail-oriented supporting sentences of a paragraph provide closeup perspectives of
various elements in the scene and glimpses of it from a variety of other angles and
distances. These supporting sentence shots effectively shape and nuance the overall
meaning of the scene by highlighting, obscuring, or ignoring various elements in it.
However it is the establishing shot that allows all the subsequent detail-shots to cohere
by providing a conceptual reference for them. It allows us to see how the subsequent
shots fit in to the scene. And if the spatial relationships in a scene are suddenly altered
(e.g., characters come or go or move about, objects are moved around, etc.), Griffith
reasoned that a reestablishing shot (another establishing shot) would help to sustain
coherence within an edited scene with shifting spatial relationships.
Match-Cutting: Forcing the analogy between scenes and paragraphs a bit further, we
might note that in cinematic scenes, just as in written paragraphs, there is sometimes a
tendency for the flow of shots or sentences to lose coherence at the precise point where
one ends and another begins. The transition from one shot/sentence to the next might
seem strained, choppy, disjointed. At this point, the writer who is engaged in the process
of editing his or her paragraph will opt to deploy a certain resource available in written
language a so-called transitional device in order to sustain the flow of continuity in
his or her prose. One such device in written language is the repetition of a key word or
phrase from a preceding sentence so that the two, previously disjointed sentences now
echo and harmoniously resonate with each other. Griffith was able to find a visual
equivalent for this kind of connection-through-repetition technique, a way to seamlessly
join incongruous shots by repeating a graphic element from the first shot in the frame of
the second shot. The generic term for this technique is called a graphic match or
match-cut, and there are several variations of it (e.g., form-cuts, match-on-color, matchon-texture). Griffith made especially good use of one particular variation of it, the
match-on-action cut, in which a vector of motion (e.g., someone or something moving
from left to right) is repeated or continued (by the same object or person or some other)
in the subsequent shot. For example, in the now-standard doorway-cut, Griffith might
present a shot of a character moving towards a door located on the right side of the
screen-frame, and just as this character reaches the edge of the screen and steps through
the doorway, Griffith cuts to a scene with the doorway now on the left-side of the frame
as the character steps through still moving from left to right and enters another room.
Sustaining the left-to-right movement across the cut helps the audience to understand
that the two rooms are spatially adjacent and connected by this doorway. Without this
device, our sense of the spatial continuity between these two shots would be less certain.
Another kind of match-cut, the eyeline-match, corresponds to yet another transitional
device that writers have at their disposal. Where they might occasionally use a pronoun
whose antecedent appears in a previous sentence in order to strengthen the coherence of

the transition from one sentence to the next, Griffith reasoned that a films editing might
accomplish this kind of grammatical connection between otherwise disparate shots. Say,
for example, we have a shot of a man standing on a city street, and this shot is followed
by another shot of a woman standing on the ledge of a tall building, apparently getting
ready to jump. The urban setting featured in both shots helps us to connect them and we
have little trouble understanding the chronological continuity implied: the man is on the
street while the woman is getting ready to jump. However the precise spatial relationship
between the two characters is not quite so coherently established. Where exactly is this
woman relative to the man? Now suppose that in the first shot the man looks up out of
the frame above him, and then we cut to the second shot. Suddenly its clear where
matters stand she is right above him! As we will see in a few weeks, this technique
will become much more refined in the montage experiments of Soviet filmmaker Lev
Kuleshov, who made famous use of it after studying one of Griffiths films.
This is not to say that the eyeline-match remained a crude and undeveloped technique in
Griffiths hands. Griffith, too, extended and developed it in an amazing and innovative
way. Driven by his desire to make the language of film every bit as expressive as the
written language of literature and the theater, Griffith went on to surmount what was
perhaps the harshest restriction on the cinematic medium: its incapacity to portray a
characters thoughts. Where our modern films have the audio resources of voice-over at
their disposal (so that we might hear the unspoken thoughts of a character shown in
closeup), silent films had to rely on the somewhat ambiguous facial expressions of
actors as they smiled, leered, or grimaced in an effort to convey what was on their
minds. Griffiths solution to this problem resulted from his combination of an expressive
facial closeup with a subsequent shot that seemed to be the natural evolution of the
eyeline-match. From the expressive facial closeup of a character apparently pondering
something, Griffith simply cut to a shot or series of shots framing whatever it was that
the character was pondering, and then cut back again to the closeup of the character as
he or she roused from these thoughts.
With this technique, which we might call the inward-eyeline-match, Griffith found he
could coherently render the thoughts of his characters as they pondered not only objects
within the scene, but also far off objects or scenes, or even scenes from the past. (Yes, it
was in fact Griffith who invented the flashback sequence-- watch for one of the earliest
flashbacks in film history next week as, towards the beginning of Part 2 in Birth of a
Nation, Margaret Cameron (Miriam Cooper) vividly recalls the death of her brother on
the battlefield and sadly rebuffs the romantic advances of her beloved Yankee, suitor.)
Optical Scene Transitions: Just as a writer will often need to add transitional phrases at
the beginning of a paragraph, so too, reasoned Griffith, should filmmakers be able to
make similarly coherent visual transitions that signal a shift from one scene to another.
Instead of introductory words and phrases (like Later . . . or The following
morning . . .), Griffith began to use dissolves, fades and irises those old-fashioned
editorial special-effects then referred to as opticals to signal a scene transition. True

these effects were already common by the time Griffith began directing, but he is
credited with first deploying them in a consistent and systematic way. Here is how he
used them:
Dissolves when one shot gradually fades-out as another simultaneously fades-in and
for an instant both are visible in superimposition typically indicates a brief lapse in
time or a shift in location to a scene that in some way parallels the one in the previous
shot.
Fades when the image darkens to black and then a new scene emerges out of the
blackness typically indicate that a more significant amount of time has passed. Fades
often mark major turning points in the story, equivalent to chapter-breaks in novels.
Irising-in occurs where the frame is matted so that the screen is darkened except for a
small circle, typically around a characters face, which gradually expands to reveal the
setting in which the character appears. This is a focalizing device indicating that the
framed character will be the central interest of the scene and his or her point-of-view
will be presented. Irising-out where a matted circle gradually contracts, usually
around a face similarly signals that that persons point-of-view has been underscored
in the previous scene. Sometimes irising-out is used to indicate that this point-of-view
will no longer predominate and the next scene will be shot with a more objective camera
or with a subjective camera aligned with a different characters point-of-view.
Cutting Rhythms Tempo and Timing: As Griffith experimented in cutting his scenes
in different ways, he soon noticed that by reducing the duration of shots in a sequence
with faster cutting, he could generate a heightened degree of excitement and suspense in
the viewer. This is similar to the literary technique of using a series of shorter sentences,
and even sentence fragments, to cause a readers eyes to race across the page to generate
excitement in dramatically charged scenes.
Additionally, Griffith found that he could further generate excitement and suspense by
cutting back and forth between two or more scenes of action a technique variously
referred to as cross-cutting,intercutting, and parallel editing. By cutting back and
forth between scenes in this way, each scene of action is simultaneously intensified (by
the accelerated cutting speed) and suspensfully interrupted (by the interjected shots of
simultaneously unfolding action). And by gradually reducing duration of shots (i.e.,
speeding up the cutting) as each scene of action approached its climax, Griffith
discovered that he could underscore and even subtly alter the dramatic arc of his stories
with different editing patterns, thereby employing the formal texture of his medium to
shape and trigger the audiences emotional response to the characters and events
portrayed.

SHOT COMPOSITION
The Vocabulary of the Movie Camera: If Griffiths revolutionary innovations in film
editing forged the visual texture of subsequent modern cinema and made it possible for
him to create longer, more elaborate and expressive films, his collaboration with
cinematographer Billy Bitzer resulted in the systematic composition of new kinds of
individual shots that were added to the lexicon of visual terms at the filmmakers
disposal. As is true of Griffiths editing techniques, many of these shots had already
appeared in films prior to Griffith, but he was the first person to use them an a consistent
and systematic way discovering in each type of shot a corresponding expressive
purpose or meaning. For example, Griffith and Bitzer were not actually the inventers of
the closeup as Griffith often claimed). But they were the first to use the closeup in
conjunction with establishing shots to emphasize details or suggest that a character was
concentrating on someone or something (framed in closeup) to the exclusion of
everything else in the scene. Similarly, in Griffiths language of film, long and medium
shots which had of course been used in film from the very beginning now took on a
more particular purpose and meaning.
Camera Distance:
Extreme Long Shot used for large-scale spectacles like battle
scenes, riots, fast vehicle-chases, etc. Note how the actors on
the Babylonian steps in this shot from Intolerance appear as
mere specks in the composition. (In this amazing establishing
shot, Bitzer will track forward while descending on a make-shift
crane, without cutting, and eventually frame his subjects in a
low-angle full shot.)

Long Shot emphasizes the context of a scene, that is the

atmosphere evoked by the setting and how that atmosphere is
significant for our understanding of the characters. Here, the
film attempts to positively shape our attitude towards the Ku
Klux Klansmen by showing them heroically charging into a
line of black soldiers who have taken over the town. The
soldiers, by contrast, are shown retreating in a panic. As we
will see next week, this is one of the SUBTLER moments of
racism that mars Griffiths masterpiece.

Full Shot tailored to frame the bodily movements or broader interactions

between individuals (chases on foot, shoot-outs). A full body shot with the
head at the top of frame and feet visible at bottom. Here Lillian Gish is using
her entire body (posture, gesture, facial expression) to portray an emotional

state.
Medium Shot used for more intimate actions or interactions between
characters (conversations, household chores). Subject is visible from
knees or waist up. Here facial expression and hand-gestures are even
more visible because of the tighter framing. Like the camera, the viewer
seems closer to the characters, as if we are part of this intimate
interaction.

Closeup momentarily arrests narrative momentum to focus on details

in a scene or to emphasize emotionally expressive elements. These
shots bring us deep into the scene, face to face with the actors. With the
closeup, Griffith introduced cinema to its most intimately expressive
capacity. (Note also the way Griffith uses back- and side-lighting to
soften the image and outline Gishs head with a glowing halo that is
reflected off her hair.)

It is worth noting that even though Griffith and Bitzer did not technically invent the
closeup, they did, nevertheless, invent one of its most popular uses the soft-focused,
soft-lit shot of a mooning lovers face, that is, the romantic glamour-shot that classic
Hollywood would hasten to exploit from that point on. Youll see several such shots of
Lillian Gish that set the pattern for the famous glamour-closeups of Greta Garbo, Ingrid
Bergman, Marilyn Monroe, and Grace Kelly.
Lighting and Camera Angle: Anticipating the German Expressionist filmmakers,
Griffith and Bitzer mounted a series of experiments in unconventional lighting
techniques and camera angles that gave their compositions a less objective, more
psychologically charged look. By diminishing the lighting to a low-key level and
sometimes by using only source lighting that is positioned within the scene, Griffith and
Bitzer could allow shadows to saturate a composition to create a markedly foreboding
atmospheric effect. Further experiments in high-key directional lighting allowed Bitzer
and Griffith to paint their compositions with both broad and fine strokes of light,
literally highlighting certain characters and objects to present them as a character might
see them i.e., radiantly standing out.
Similarly, Griffith and Bitzer also experimented in expressive camera angles to further
subjectivize their compositions. Their unconventional high-angle shots with the
camera positioned well above eye-level effectively made characters appear more
vulnerable, smaller in the frame relative to any foreground elements. Low-angle shots
alternatively made characters more frighteningly imposing as they towered above the
camera.

Movement and Mood: Griffiths camera not only panned and pushed its way through
scenes to follow characters as they walked about, but it also tracked often at high
speeds when Bitzer mounted it to an automobile to follow fast-moving vehicles or
running figures in exterior shots. Griffith discovered that the speed of the mobile
camera, like the tempo of editing, could shape the audiences emotional response to a
scene. Slow, fluid camera movements throughout a shot give rise to a reflective,
contemplative mood in which specific visual details in the shot attract more attention
just as they do with longer takes. Faster or more jolting movements generate the kind of
breathless excitement that editing achieves with fast-cutting in or between scenes. Once
again, Griffith and Bitzer did not really invent the techniques of camera movement
(although they did invent the crane-shot). But their camera moved more often, more
smoothly, more quickly, and more systematically than anyone elses had up to that point.