Why is Griffith often called The Father of the Motion Picture?

Today I would like to talk about the early days of movie making in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We will concentrate on D.W. Griffith, a famous American motion-picture director, who established a new standard for motion-picture production. He is often called the Father of the Motion Picture.
    Before the pioneering films of D.W. Griffith, filmmakers were limited by several miss guided 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 God, was the name of the film in which we saw the first use of the full shot. After progressing from a 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 dose-up. The close-up had been used before though only rarely and merely as a visual stunt, as for example, in Edqead Ascort’s The Great Train Robbery, which was made in 1903. But it was not until 1970 in Griffith’s movie called After Many Years that the dramatic potential of the close-up was 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 Biogress 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 a shot of her husband east 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.