As the film boom got under way, the Pathéa film-makers continued to refine the continuity of action from shot to shot in their films. In films like Pathéa's le Cheval emballé (The Runaway Horse) (1907), there appeared a new feature, which can be called cross-cutting between parallel actions. In this film, a delivery man is going about his lady's house inside an apartment house while his horse steals a big meal from a bag of oats outside a feed store. The film cuts back and forwards between the two chains of action four times before the delivery man comes out, and the horse runs away with him. More importantly, early next year the Pathé production unit down in the south of France in Nice made le Médecin du chateau (The Physician of the Castle), in which there are cuts back and forth between criminals threatening a doctor's wife and child, while the doctor himself drives home to rescue them after being warned by telephone. This film also contains a cut in to a closer shot of the doctor as he hears the dreadful news on the telephone, which uses the new idea of getting in closer to the actor to accentuate the emotion.
In the United States, Vitagraph was also trying cross-cutting for suspense in 1907 and 1908 with The Mill Girl and Get Me a Stepladder. Before D.W. Griffith started directing at Biograph in May 1908, he had seen the two Pathé films just mentioned, and a number of Vitagraph films as well. But Griffith's first use of cross-cutting in The Fatal Hour, made in July 1908, has a much stronger suspense story served by this construction than those in the earlier Pathé examples. From this point onwards Griffith certainly developed the device much further, gradually increasing the number of alternations between two, and later three, sets of parallel scenes, and also their speed. This intensified usage was only slowly taken up by other American film-makers. So although he did not invent the technique of cross-cutting, he did consciously develop it into a powerful method of film construction. It is also important to note that Griffith described cross-cutting indiscriminately as the ‘switch-back’ or ‘cut-back’ or ‘flash-back’ technique, and that by the last of these terms he did not mean what we now understand by a ‘flash-back’. The true ‘flash-back’ was also developed in this period, but not at all by D.W. Griffith.
Although D. W. Griffith did not invent any new film techniques, he was the best film director working up to 1913, and this was because he made better dramatic and artistic use of the medium than other directors. One aspect of this was the structure he gave his films, with the final scene mirroring the opening scene, as in the example of A Drunkard's Reformation already mentioned above. Many other examples of this like The Country Doctor (1908) can easily be found in his work. But the most important thing Griffith did was work out significant and expressive natural gestures in intensive rehearsal periods with his actors, before the film was shot, such as the enraged and jealous husband in The Voice of the Child (1911) walking around his office chomping on a cigar and puffing clouds of smoke out of it through clenched teeth. Griffith's increased use of cross-cutting between parallel actions helped him to get more shots into his films than other directors, but he also had another method for doing this. This was to split a scene that could have been played in room (or other place), into two or more sections that moved backwards and forwards between adjoining rooms or spaces. The result of this was that D.W. Griffith's films had at least twice as many shots in them as did those of other American directors. Over this period, the other directors speeded up, but so did Griffith. At first, the technique of cutting in to a closer shot of an actor in a scene made no contribution to the increase in cutting rate, because it was still very rarely done, despite having been established as a possibility in the previous period. The exception to this was a close shot of an object, which was sometimes used to make clear exactly what a person was doing. It was only towards 1913 that film-makers began to cut into closer shots with any regularity.
However, American film-makers did get closer to the actors on the average by shooting the whole scene with the camera closer than previously. The Vitagraph company led the way here, by using what they called “the nine-foot line” from 1910 onwards. This meant that the actors played a scene up to a line marked on the ground nine feet from the camera lens, which meant that they were shown cut off at the waist in the image. Some, but not all, American film-makers followed their example, calling it the “American foreground”, while European film-makers stayed with the “French foreground” established by the Pathé about 1907, which only cut the actors off at the shins. This corresponded to the actors playing up to a line put down 4 metres in front of the camera lens.
