Thinking in Pictures: Dramatic Structure in D. W. Griffith?s Biograph Films

Thinking in Pictures: Dramatic Structure in D. W. Griffith’s Biograph Films by Joyce E. Jesionowski offers a rigorous reconsideration of Griffith’s reputation as both pioneer and mythmaker in early cinema. While Griffith has often been credited—sometimes uncritically—with “inventing” film technique, Jesionowski situates his Biograph work within a broader international context in which many cinematic devices, from fades and dissolves to intercutting and camera movement, were already in practice. Rather than attributing to Griffith the discovery of technique, she argues that his significance lies in shaping a new relationship between film and its spectators. Griffith’s Biograph films, made between 1908 and 1913, reveal an evolving consciousness of cinema as an art of construction, not simple reproduction, and demonstrate his awareness that audiences co-create meaning by filling narrative and visual gaps. For Griffith, cinematic storytelling became a contract with viewers, asking them to “see thoughts” in silence and to participate imaginatively in the drama.

Jesionowski shows how Griffith refined this collaborative mode of viewing into a distinctive visual and narrative system. Through intercutting, spatial elision, and repetition of images, Griffith achieved a plausibility that critics such as Frank Woods and Hugo Münsterberg recognized as simultaneously illusionistic and constructed. The Biograph films reveal a process of learning to harness audience perception as the central engine of cinematic drama, converting movements in space into relationships between characters and emotions. Jesionowski emphasizes Griffith’s ability to subjugate acting, scenery, and pictorial beauty to the larger organizational moment in which narrative coherence emerges from the arrangement of shots. In this sense, Griffith’s Biograph period exemplifies cinema’s departure from theater toward a unique visual medium, one defined not by invention of isolated devices but by the discovery of cinematic structure itself. Her study restores Griffith to film history not as sole inventor, but as the filmmaker who first systematically explored the principles of cinematic organization that remain foundational to narrative film.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1987.