A、Stuntman. B、Actor. C、Film producer. D、Movie critic. C

Today I would like to talk about the early days of movie making in the late nineteen and the early twentieth centuries. Before the pioneering films of D. W. Griffith, filmmakers were limited by several misguided conventions of the era.
    According to one, the camera was always fixed at a viewpoint corresponding to that of the spectator in the theatre, 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 m the full shot, the nest logical step for Griffith was to bring in the camera still closer, in what is now called the closeup. The close up had been used before though only rarely and merely as a visual stunt, as for example, in Edward Asport’s "The Great Train Robbery", which was made in 1903. But not until 1908 in Griffth’s movie called "After Many Years" was the dramatic potential of the closeup first exploited. In the scene from "After Many Years" that we are about to see, pay special attention to the closeup of Annie Lee’s worded face as she awaits her husband’s return. In 1908, this closeup shocked everyone in the Biogress Studio. But Griffith bad no time for argument. He bad another surprise even more radical to offer. Immediately following the closeup 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.