The Biograph Company, started by David Wark Griffith, was also a contender for recognition.. The Great Jewel Robbery and The Silver Wedding both used quirky chase scenes and imaginative narration. Griffith was the towering figure to lead film in an entirely new direction. In his early years, he was closely associated with the Broadway producer David Belasco. Griffith ingested pathos, melodrama, suspense, purity and the entire spectrum of the actors' craft from Belasco and freely used them later in his films. Not just an actor, he was also a playwright, having completed an adaptation of Tosca, among other works. Griffith attempted to sell the play to Ed Porter but he refused it. Instead, he offered Griffith a job as an actor. Griffith took the job and began his film career. It was as a director that he made his mark. He developed narrative cinema, the next logical step after the primitive style of Edwin Porter. Film became a collaborative venture as well, and worth noting is that Billy Bitzer was the company's cinematographer and Griffith was to employ him for all of his major films.

In 1909 Griffith made his most important early work, The Lonely Villa. It was a direct steal of an earlier French Pathe film called The Physician in the Castle. What distinguished Griffith's film from his predecessor's was the use of cinematic space. By increasing the number of individual shots to more than double the original, he was able to create the effect of greater space and also create an illusion of greater narrative: crosscutting, and shot-countershot. This enhanced the film so that the narrative was intelligible without previous knowledge of the story. Titles and inter-titles were used to continue the story line so they too could be dispensed with for a smoother narrative.

Cinema at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century began to be considered a potential art form. It was an acknowledged commercial product and had been for some time. With the emergence of D.W. Griffith, there was hope that at least a few films might be raised to the status of art. He was extraordinarily prolific and his pioneering work was readily acknowledged. He had his own stable of stars. They included Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore, Lillian and Dorothy Gish, Mae Marsh, Blanche Sweet, Harry Carey and Donald Crisp.

It was an Italian epic titled Cabiria (1914) that became the model Griffith would take for his epics. Cairia's running time is said to have been in excess of three hours; its sets were enormous, thus dramatizing the production. Cabiria is set in the third century B.C. when Rome was at war with Carthage. Carthage is located.in North Africa near Tunis in Tunisia. Briefly the story tells of the abduction from a noble Roman family of the child, Cabiria by the Carthiginians. She is rescued many years later by the Roman soldier Fulvius Axilla and his slave Maciste. The rescue precipitates the love affair between Cabiria and Fulvius. It was the mise-en-scene of Carthage by the imaginative film designers that was the high point of the film.

The film fueled Griffith's ambition. He planned his historic epics after viewing Cabiria. Griffith began work on The Birth of a Nation, based on the novel The Klansman, in 1915 and Intolerance in 1916. The Birth of a Nation was a film about the American Civil War. Although there were a number of causes for the conflict, Griffith's main focus for the film was the period of reconstruction after the war. The white and black races mixed freely after the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation and the war. It was Griffith's perception that miscegenation would proliferate..Such interbreeding would result in the birth of mullatoes, an anathema to Griffith. Many national events were depicted in the film on a grand scale, not the least of which was the tense scene featuring the Ku Klux Klansmen riding to rescue the white woman backing away from the mulatto man approaching her. The episode created a sensational furor, each side in fierce opposition to the other and certain of his position. Remarkably, the work was a sweeping success at the boxoffice as much for its publicity as for its message. However, not everybody was enchanted by the film. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People organized a public campaign to have the film legally banned, but to no avail.

Griffith's second epic, Intolerance, was a response to his critics about The Birth of a Nation as much as any philosophical view he may have held about lack of tolerance of others' beliefs. The story line strung four incidents together depicting his theme of intolerance with intercuts of a mother rocking her baby. This was his favorite symbol of gentleness and purity. The first episode concerned lack of tolerance for white immigrants in a contemporary urban ghetto, much as did his earlier film The Kleptomaniac; the persecution of Jesus by the Jews, the persecution on French Huguenots in sixteenth century France and lastly, obscure struggles in ancient Babylon. It was the Babylon sequence that really stirred his imagination. The licentiousness and carnage he created in this episode he justified by the purity and righteousness he portrayed in the other three. Unfortunately, Intolerance was a commercial failure and except for its spectacular theatrics, didn't advance film art.