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are employed for purely dramatic effect. The memorable panoramic views of the battlefields in The Birth of a Nation give an impression of the nation-wide disaster against which the story of the Camerons and the Stonemans is told. They establish the wider context which the story's gravity demands.
An innovation similar in purpose is Griffith's use of the flashback. Here, again, Griffith saw that a character's actions could often be more clearly motivated by letting the spectator see certain thoughts or memories passing through the character's mind. In Intolerance, for example, when The Friendless One is just about to implicate The Boy in the murder of The Musketeer of the Slums, she has a momentary pang of conscience as she recalls the time when The Boy did her a kindness. From the scene in the present, Griffith simply mixed to the earlier scene and then mixed back again. The continuity of dramatic ideas was sufficiently forceful for the scene to be completely lucid.
The revolution in film craftsmanship which followed Griffith's many innovations was felt in various ways in the routine of production. Armed with his new editing methods, Griffith was no longer obliged to stage scenes in their entirety. Where Porter might have staged an elaborate chase sequence and photographed it as it might be seen by a spectator present on the spot, Griffith took separate shots of the pursuer and the pursued. It was only when the scenes came to be edited that they conveyed the desired picture of a chase. Scenes which could previously only be recorded with great difficulty, could now be assembled from easily staged shots : huge battle scenes, fatal accidents, hair-raising chases — all these could now be conveyed to the spectator by appropriate editing. The massacres of the Babylonians in Intolerance are presented with conviction by being reconstructed from shots of manageable length. A continuity consisting of one shot of a Persian releasing an arrow, followed by a second shot of a Babylonian, struck and falling to the ground, gives an entirely convincing picture of a scene which would have been difficult to handle in a single shot.
If Griffith's methods made the staging of spectacle scenes easier, they made the actor's task in films considerably more difficult. Acting in close shot demanded greater control and subtlety of expression than had hitherto been necessary. Whereas in Porter's time it had been necessary to over-act to convey an effect at all, the camera's proximity imposed on the actor the new discipline of restraint.
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