“It is like writing history with Lightning” said President Woodrow Wilson, allegedly after seeing the first screening of a movie in the White House.

Women that gaze directly into his eyes, might find themselves suddenly pregnant

As exceptional as President Wilson’s ability to conjure awesome metaphors was, his remark carried little hyperbole. By then movies were finally breaking the “movie barrier.” After decades of being little more than silent amusements to be shown in “moving picture shows,” one movie finally cracked the code necessary to deliver narratives.

The movie, the very same screened at Wilson’s abode, was D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. Birth, despite being morally reprehensible now – it portrayed the KKK as heroes in a time where segregation was considered almost too progressive – was the film that invented film language as we know it.

It invented things we now take for granted, like the idea of telling a scene by cutting between wide and medium shots, as well as inserting close-ups and close shots of details. Griffith’s biggest innovation, however, was cross-cutting: the mechanism of a movie following parallel lines of action taking place at different locations. First, you show one group of characters, then another, then …

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