On the upcoming Academy Awards ceremony you'll hear lots of names tossed around but you won't hear any mention of the man who did more than anyone else to create the film industry in America; D.W. Griffith. Before Griffith's time, the early 1900s, the quality of motion pictures was poor and films were too short to tell a complete story. D.W. Griffith revolutionized filmmaking. His creations and achievements are too lengthy to catalogue here but they include techniques such as the close-up, the fade-out, panning shots, high-angle shots, expanding and contracting a scene, the flashback, and crosscutting to show simultaneous … Continue reading Radical Reconstruction in Hollywood