Cutting to different angles within a scene now became well-established as a technique for dissecting a scene into shots in American films. This approach had appeared a few times in earlier years, but in general cuts to or from a closer shot within a scene were still being made more or less down the lens axis as established in the Long Shot of the scene in question. The particular form of cutting to different angles within a scene in which the direction changes by more than ninety degrees is called reverse-angle cutting by film-makers. The leading figure in the full development of reverse-angle cutting was Ralph Ince. Films that he made at Vitagraph in 1915 such as The Right Girl andHis Phantom Sweetheart have a large number of reverse-angle cuts in interior, as well as exterior, scenes. Other directors were also just starting to take up this style in 1915, for instance William S. Hart in Bad Buck of Santa Ynez.
As for Griffith, in Birth of a Nation there are just eight cuts to reverse-angle shots in the scene in Ford's Theatre, while elsewhere throughout the two-and-a-half hour length of this film there are only four more true reverse-angle cuts. Nevertheless, the Griffith style of film-making was still followed in its full idiosyncrasy, with extensive use of side by side spaces and a definite “front” for the camera, in most slapstick comedy. Directors of dramatic films who had worked Griffith also followed his style fairly closely, and it the standard for films made by his Fine Arts section of the Triangle company.
By 1916 there are a number of films in which there are around 15 to 20 true reverse-angle cuts per hundred shot transitions, such as The Deserter (Scott Sidney) and Going Straight. By the end of the war such films formed an appreciable but minor part of production: e.g. The Gun Woman (F. Borzage, 1918) and Jubilo (Clarence Badger, 1919). All this hardly concerned European cinema, where those few reverse-angle cuts used were mostly between a watcher and what he sees from his Point of View, both being filmed in a fairly distant shot. However, after the end of the war some of the brighter young directors such as Lubitsch started using a few reverse-angle cuts, mostly in association with Point of View cutting.
