Another important development was in the use of reverse angle shots; that is, continuing a scene with a cut to a shot of the action taken from the opposite direction. There were isolated examples of this very early, and the first of these, Williamson's Attack on a China Mission(1900) has already been mentioned. But in 1908, starting with l’Assassinat du duc de Guise (The Assassination of the Duc de Guise), there began to be other films in which a scene was shown from another direction by cutting to the opposite side. This effect was imitated occasionally in Europe and the United States over the next couple of years, and came to be called a “reverse scene”.
The next step, in which two actors facing each other are shown in successive close shots from taken opposite directions towards each of them, is first to be seen at the end of 1911 inThe Loafer, made by Arthur Mackley for Essanay. This is what is called reverse-angle cutting, and it is used constantly in present day film-making. However, it took some years to catch on with other American film-makers, but by 1913, it was starting to occur with greater frequency in the work of a few directors. This happened entirely when they were filming exterior scenes, where there was no problem about shooting past the edge of the studio set. A leading example of this use of close in reverse-angle cutting is His Last Fight (1913), directed by Ralph Ince for Vitagraph, in which one-third of the cuts are between a shot and the reverse angle. However, this sort of thing never happened in D.W. Griffith's films, or in European films.
