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Actress Linda Ardvison, writing in the periodcial Film Fun during 1916, includes the "now historic" film "The Advntures of Dollie" (one reel) directed by D.W Griffith for the Biograph Film Company in 1908. Arvidson wrote under the name Mrs. D.W. Griffith. In one installment she reminisces about travelling to film exterior scenes, claiming they hadn't automobiles yet and visited locations by train or by boat. In a later installment she dicusses her salary for the film, "How much money I made! Twenty eight dollars in two weeks, enough for a whole spring outfit." What is more enjoyable is the autobiography of Mrs. D.W. Griffith, When Movies Were Young, published in 1925. Much of the material from the Film Fun periodical is repeated, worded similarly, as she gives an account of D.W. Griffith the actor being offered a provisional chance to direct his first film, "The Adventures of Dollie", given that he could return to acting if necessary. Mrs. D.W. Griffith exlains Griffith having been accepted as a director for Biograph, "For one year now, those movies so covered with slime and so degraded would have to come first to come first in his thoughts and affections....agonizing days when he would have given his life to be able to chuck the job." She includes not only the studio on East Fourteenth Street but the theaters on Third and Ninth Avenues as places into which one would not be seen going.
Author Roger Manvell, in his sixty page introduction to the anthology "Experiment in the Film" credits "The Adventures of Dollie" as the first film in which D.W. Griffith had used the flashback.
Peter Cowie, in his volume Eighty Years of Cinema, notes that it was in 1908, in the film "For Love of Gold", that D.W. Griffith had first used the close up shot in film.
Silent Film D.W. Griffith D. W. Griffith

The library, built in 1809, is beautiful. These two botttom photographs in particular were taken from behnd Donna's desk from where she checks in books with a scanner and removes the checkout cards. I discussed theology with a new minister today explaining to him that he was the eighth minster I have had a rapport with and that my questions are more precise after a decade. There have been ten or eleven I have known since attending. Scott Lord

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In the autobiographical reminiscences William N. Selig printed in Photoplay Magazine during 1920, Selig, perhaps almost graciously, credits Edison with the "first single reel picture containing a story in continuity", although he adds that "The Great Train Robbery" was only 800 feet and that he was soon on Edison's coattails with films of his own of length equal to it. Interestingly, Selig recounts in the article director Frank Boggs as "the real pioneer in photographic reproduction", his during 1908 releasing a one reel film every week; Selig claims Boggs was assasinated on the Selig Studios during 1912. Vladimir Petric in A Visual/Analytical History of Silent Film (1895-1930), Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, notes Porter's "The Great Train Robbery" as a "primitive use of parralel editing to dramatize the narrative". Not only is this in sharp contrast to the earlier cinema of attractions that relegated storytelling to the act of display, but the film is significant as the first film made in the Western genre. It is uncanny that the closing shot, as a subjective shot, is an attraction, something static and something dispalyed, urging the spectatator to draw and shoot back. Patric Vonderau and Vinzenz Hedigar have written, "The visuality of the display, however, is still indispensible to its effect."- albeit their recent volume, Films That Work, is primarily concerned with international industrial films.
Author Nicholas A. Vardac opines that it was the films of Edwin S. Porter that D.W. Griffith aquired the technique of viewing the shot within its context as a "syntax for the melodrama". Whether crosscutting began with Edwin S. Porter and "The Great Train Robbery", a film which is attributed as having used croscutting in the volume The Film Idea, written by Stanley J. Solomon, or whether it was more properly developed by D.W. Griffith around 1908, as with the parallel editing in the 1907 films "The Greaser's Gauntlet" and "The Fatal Hour" (Phillipe Gauthier, Harvard University), author Stanley Solomon points out that crosscutting was intrinsiclly cinematic, rather than dramaturgical or theatrical by describing it as "a technique suitable to the form of cinema but unnatural to the form of nineteenth century stage drama, which was at that time a significant influence on the new media." A recent online film class on how to "read" a film from described the film as being comprised of "seperate shots of non-continuous, non-overlapping action" while being careful to designate the film as an early example of crosscutting. Of "The Great Train Robbery", author Peter Cowie, in his volume Eighty Years of Cinema, writes, "The movement, as well as the narrative, was carried over from one scene to another." Cowie mentions the film "Runaway Match", directed in 1903 by Alf Collins as being an early narrative silent in which "camera movements and positions are exploited to advantage". The film is fast paced, depicting a couple hurriedly en route to their betrothal, but includes a close up insert shot of their wedding rings.
After having defined a seminal theory of the cinema of attractions to fit early examples of pioneer cinema, Tom Gunning goes further to see it surplanted by a cinema of narrative integration-during a discussion on early Biograph films Gunning mentions that the films "A Trip to the Moon" and "The Great Train Robbery" are in fact narrative by virtue of being storytelling, but lack the characterization involved in later films. Tom Gunning goes further to imply that a cinema of narrative integration began with D.W. Griffith, leaving out Edwin S. Porter, Gunning citing two of Porter's films, "College Chums" (1907) and "Cupid Pranks" (1908), which employed a split screen, as having lacked the "articulation of the dramatic content through filmic means." Gunning writes that even Porter's later films, "Although narrative films, they seem more related to the cinema of attractions' display of technological novelties." Athur Knight, as early as 1957 in his volume The Liveliest Art, matter of factly records that Melies' 1902 film "A Trip to the Moon" antedated "our own" "The Great Train Robbery" of 1903 in having "demonstrated the narrative powers of the new medium",but credits the cinema of attractions with adding the novelty of seeing real things in motion, ie. locomotives thundering down the track and ocean waves crashing towards the audience. Knight then credits Edward S. Porter as having eclipsed Melies as a director by his film having "revealed for the first time the function and the power of the cut in telling a story on the screen.....No less important to the success of 'The Great Train Robbery' was its freshness of camera placement." D.W. Griffith would be credited with breaking the standard distance between the actor and authorial camera's view of the actor as seen by the audience, the Vitagraph nine foot line, by changing the placement of the camera mid-scene, as when cutting to a closer angle- characterization integrated with narrativity. It should be noted that prior to 1908, the director at the Biograph Film Company was Wallace McCutcheon, who directed with Edward S. Porter and was responsible for two Westerns filmed during 1903, "The Pioneers" and "Kit Carson" and the 1907 film "Daniel Boone". With its pedestrian lack of plot, the 1906 film "A Winter Straw Ride", filmed by Edward S. Porter with Wallace McCutheon for Edison, features the attraction of movement within the frame, diagnol movement from the background of the shot to the foreground, which intentionally or unintentionally, reverses screen direction from left screen to right to right screen to left and then later in fact reverses screen direction from background to foreground to foreground to background. The entirety of the one reeler is kept in exterior long shot. Tom Gunning has written, "The cinema of attractions, rather than telling stories, bases itself on film's ability to show something". Gunning almost goes so far as to describe it as exhibitionist rather than voyueristic and this nearly accounts for the characters in McCutheon's film quickly approaching the camera and quickly retreating from it. It would be D.W. Griffith that would pioneer the cinema of narrative integration.
Film historian Charles Mussur, looking at "The Great Train Robbery" in Before the Nickelodeon :Edwin S. Porter, writes, "Porter's film meticulously documents a process...The film's narrative structure, as Gaudreault notes, utilizes temporal repetition with an overall narrative progression." As narrative it was essentially a reenactment film. He adds that "Porter exploited procedures that heighten the realism and believabilty of the image" (David Levy).
It is apparent that "The Great Train Robbery" was filmed not only in the studio, but on actual locations, including in fact a train Porter had borrowed in New Jersey; it also apparent that "The Great Train Robbery" released during 1904 by Sigmund Lubin also combined scenes filmed both outdoors and inside the studio, the film also concluding with a close up of an outlaw. Catalougues "free upon request" featuring "Lubin's Latest Hits" list Lubin's "The Great Train Robbery" as running 600 ft, there being sixteen seperate scenes to the film. The 1903 Edison Manufacturing Company catalougue lists the running legnth of Edison's "The Great Train Robbery", a "sensational and highly tragic subject", as 740 ft, the film divided into fourteen scenes.
The sequel to "The Great Train Robbery", titled "The Little Train Robbery" (1905) although directed by Edwin S. Porter for the Edison Company, is a parody, and features an all child actor cast.
In regard to the concluding shot of the film with the outlaw, a shot that quickly reminds us of The Syndics of the Drapers' Guild by Rembrandt, Tom Gunning, writing about Attractions in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded edited by Wanda Strauven, sees the end shot as an "interruption to narrative coherence". Charles Musser writes that the cinema of attractions was a cinema of astonishment that evolved quivkly into multi-shot narrative having as a common denominator of "actions", the filmed event. He continues that in the "The Great Train Robbery" the action of the bandit pointing at the audience and then later shooting one of the characters in film was intended to bring an occaision of spectatorial identification.
Crosscutting and paralell editing in A Narrow Escape Silent Film D. W. Griffith

I wanted to photograph the tulips I brought Donna during church- I had to run an errand and we are here during three church services- from outside looking into the church,but as you can tell, the reflection precludes it. The otherside of the building looks on to the adjacent churchyard with tulips on the graves of Ben Franklin's parents where I "reflect" every week (diligently) for those who have passed.

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