Biograph 1908-1913

• "A film director had to provide the film with continuity. . . telling a story without confusing the audience."
• "His working-class people and members of racial minorities were from the beginning endowed with a humanity that set them apart from the stock cariacatures. Often minority figures were the heroes of his films, exhibiting moral strength superior to their white antagonists."
• "Gradually, he increased the complexity and variety of movements within his frame, so that the hallmark of Griffith films became the rich texture and detail of his settings and his direction of acting . . . mise en scene."
• "He gave more detailed attention to natural and artificial lighting, using side lighting for the effect of firelight, backlighting with reflectors to soften facial features, changing light within a shot, using fades and focused lighting on individuals. By 1912, he had become a master of the effects of chiarosuro of light and dark shading, in a motion-picture frame."

Judith of Bethulia feature film 1913

• "Griffith saw the opportunity to try new ways of cutting and assembling separate shots - to try, indeed, a new way of conceiving the space and time of the succession of moving images. . . Montage meant the building up of impressions through the juxtaposition of separate shots, in order to create a single, complete mental image or emotional state."

Harry E. Aitken's Mutual 1913-1915

• "Social realism was subsumed as a minor theme beside his predilections for the other extremes of sentiment and spectacle."

Birth of a Nation 1915

• "Is it a work of racist propaganda or of consummate artistic skill?"
• "In fictional films didacticism usually appears in characterization. . . films with exceptional visual qualities and obviously simplistic, one-dimensional caricatures of their villains. . . or films in which the antagonists are treated not as dunces and fools but as complex, intelligent persons whose perspectives and policies are dramatically shown to be inadequate or wrong."
• "Giffith undercut his artistry to make didactic points. Many of the shots are slower and more static than usual in Griffith films; his omnipresent use of iris and vignette techniques to highlight faces or actions sometimes proves enormously effective but often simply curtails the space and movement of the shot."
• "The acting is strong and memorable, but most of the whites as well as the blacks are caricatures. Insofar as aesthetic judgements can ever be separated from moral choices, The Birth of a Nation seems as remarkable, and as flawed, in its art as in its theme of white supremacy."

Sources:

• quotations from Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America, chapter 4.
  
• Hollywood Moguls and Laemmle and Fox
  
• Filmnotes includes Birth of a Nation
  
• "D. W. Griffith, Father of Film," from PBS American Masters, March 24, 1993.