The years 1914-1919 in America also saw the consolidation of the forms of what was to become the dominant mode of commercial cinema: “continuity cinema”, or “classical cinema”. During this period there were other styles that were still important, and these can be considered to lie along a spectrum between the best examples of “continuity cinema” at one extreme, and at the other extreme the “DIS-continuity cinema” of D.W. Griffith. There are a number of factors involved in the strong and apparent visual discontinuities between successive shots in Griffith's films, and the use of cross-cutting between parallel actions is only the most obvious of these. In 1915, cuts within the duration of a scene were still relatively infrequent in his films, and when they do occur they were frequently from Long Shot or Medium Long Shot (which were the shots he most used) to a Big Close Up of an insert detail, which only occupied a small part of the frame in the previous shot. This in itself introduces a fairly strong visual discontinuity across the cut, but as well as that, the cut-in shot might often have a circular vignette mask if it were a Close Up of a person, so reinforcing the effect. And sometimes the now-standard Griffith iris-out and iris-in might also be left on the inserted shot, even though it had action continuity with the shots on either side of it. As well as all this there was Griffith's habit of moving the action into another shot in an adjoining space, and then back again if it was at all possible, which produced a marked change in background, which also made its small contribution to the discontinuity between shots.
One of the advanced continuity techniques involves the exact way the movement of actors from a shot in one location to another in a neighbouring location is handled. At best this kind of transition had previously been dealt with by having the directions of travel of the actor in the two shots correspond on the screen, but in a film such as The Bank Burglar's Fate (Jack Adolfi, 1914), one can see shot transitions in which a cut is made from an actor just leaving the frame, to a shot of him well inside the frame in an adjoining location, which have the positions and directions so well chosen that to the casual eye his movement appears quite continuous, and the real space and time ellipsis between the shots is concealed. Other good examples of this technique for eliminating several yards of waste space and a few seconds of waste time can be seen in Ralph Ince's films, particularly The Right Girl (1915), and by 1919 it was widely diffused in American films, but not in those made in Europe. All this connects with the rise of the use of cutting to different angles within a scene during the years 1914-1919, and in particular to the development of reverse-angle cutting.
