D.W. Griffith was the most influential film director during the early years of Hollywood. This man started many of the stylistic features and techniques of filmmaking that became established as the Hollywood standard. His work brought a wider appreciation to the movies as an art and also helped films attract a more educated and wealthier audience.
Griffith directed hundreds of short films between 1908 and 1913, and many of feature-length films in his later years. Thoughout his career, which ended in 1930, he added a variety of stylistic improvements. Many filmmakers before and after D.W. Griffith thought of movies as filmed theater. They would place the camera a set distance from the performers, photographing the scene from a single viewpoint as a spectator would see it in the theater. Griffith did not use these rules for his films. He was continually moving and shifting the camera to different distances from the action. He established the close-up shot of a body part, the face, or an object as a basic part of filming. Using the close-up, Griffith also had his actors/actresses playing parts of greater realsim and psychological depth than was common for that time.
D.W. Griffith also changed film editing. Instead of filming an entire scene in one shot, or a few shots, he broke up scenes into many shots, filming from different angles and distances. He used this idea of film editing to include action at different places so that the story could move quickly from location to location in a style that is called cross-cutting.
More Links: