Screenwriting, 1905-1930A Griffith & His Students

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The Exemplary Practices of David Griffith, Part 1: Establishing Events Historically
(1968) Cameron, Evan Wm.
With the release of THE BIRTH OF A NATION in 1915, David Griffith established by common consent and emulation of his peers the prototype of international feature filmmaking – an exemplar of the possibilities of practice within a natural art. A year later he completed INTOLERANCE, the film that was to entice a young Russian, Vsevolod Pudovkin, to explain what was going on and thus complete the paradigm. Within this essay I explain what Griffith did, how he came to do and why the doing of it was so influential.
Open Access
Stroheim's Tactics of Comparison
(1968) Cameron, Evan Wm.
Three-quarters of Stroheim's GREED [1924] was cut from the film before its release at the insistence of the studio by a sequence editors who, in Stroheim's phrase, "did not know anything about my editing ideas", but the film, even in truncated form, remains among the most memorable ever made. What kind of "editing ideas" could have informed the making of a movie that remains powerful with only a fourth of it remaining? Stroheim, I suggest, had glimpsed the possibilities of a shot-by-shot 'tactics of comparison' within scenes comparable in aim and effect to the story-by-story 'strategies of comparison' that Griffith had foreshadowed in INTOLERANCE.