Page "History of film" Paragraph 96

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.