ABSTRACT
The first dramatic films were rendered as if through a proscenium. The camera was placed in position and all the action in the scene took place within that camera frame. The audience’s view was much the same as a theater audience sitting frontrow center. The American director D. W. Griffith was one of the first to move the audience onto the stage with works like For Love of Gold (1908), The Lonely Villa (1909), The Lonedale Operator (1911), and the highly influential, but strongly racist, Birth of a Nation (1915). “Look here!” he said to the audience with his camera — “Now, here!” Griffith was not only moving the audience into the scene; he was then turning their seats this way and that — moving them into the face of a character, then in the next instant pulling them to the back of the “theater” to get a larger view of the character in relation to other characters or showing the character in relation to his or her surroundings.
