Have you ever wondered what it was like in the early days of movie making in the late 19th and early 20th centuries?

Before the pioneering films of D. W. Griffith, film makers were limited by several misguided conventions of the era.  According to one, the camera was always fixed at a viewpoint corresponding to that of a spectator in a theater -- a position now known as the long shot.  It was another convention that the position of the camera never changed in the middle of a scene.

In last week's films, we saw how Griffith ignored both these limiting conventions and brought the camera closer to the actor.  This shot, now known as a full shot, was considered revolutionary at the time.  "For Love of Gold" was the name of the film in which we saw the first use of the full shot.

After progressing from the long shot to the full shot, the next logical step for Griffith was to bring in the camera still closer in what is now called the close-up.  The close-up had been used before, although only rarely, and merely as a visual stunt, as for example for in Edwin S. Porter’s “The Great Train Robbery” which was made in 1903.  But not until 1908 in Griffith’s movie called “After Many Years” was the dramatic potential of the close-up first exploited.  In the scene from “After Many Years” that we are about to see, pay special attention to the close-up of Annie Lee’s worried face as she awaits her husband’s return.  In 1908 this close-up shocked everyone in the Biograph studio.  But Griffith had no time for argument.  He had another surprise, even more radical to offer.  Immediately following the close-up of Annie, he inserted a picture of the object of her thoughts – her husband, cast away on a desert isle.  This cutting from one scene to another without finishing either of them, brought a torrent of criticism on the experimenter.