Perhaps no other director has generated as wide a range of critical reactions as DW Griffith. For film scholars, Griffith is the most familiar name in the history of cinema. Generally recognized as America's most influential director (and certainly one of the most prolific), he is also perceived as one of the most limited. Praise for his mastery of cinematic technique is accompanied by repeated accusations of his moral, artistic, and intellectual inadequacies. On the one hand, Kevin Brownlow called him "the only director in America creative enough to be called a genius." On the other hand, Paul Rotha calls his contribution to the development of cinema "negligible" and Susan Sontag complains of his "extreme vulgarity and even senselessness"; his work "reeks of a fervent moralism about sexuality and violence" and his energy derives "from a repressed voluptuousness". Griffith began his filmmaking career in 1908, and over the next five years made approximately 485 films, nearly all of which have been preserved. These films, one or two reels long, have routinely been considered apprentice works, films in which, to quote Stephen Zito, "Griffith borrowed, invented, and perfected the forms and techniques he later used to such memorable effect in The Birth of a nation, intolerance, broken flowers and the road to the east." These early "Biographies" (named after the studio where Griffith worked) have usually been studied for their stylistic features, particularly parallel editing, camera placement, and treatment of light and shadow. Their most popular structuring tools are last-minute saving and cross-cutting. In recent years, however, biographies have taken on a higher status in film history. Many historians and critics classify... middle of paper... Does Griffith create the impression of narrative immobility? Overall, Griffith's films of the mid-to-late 1920s did not fare well critically, although they have their defenders. The usual view—that Griffith's work became dull and mediocre when he lost his personal studio at Mamaroneck in 1924—continues to prevail, despite calls for reevaluation from John Dorr, Arthur Lennig, and Richard Roud. The eight films he made as a contract director for Paramount and United Artists are usually studied (if at all) as examples of the studio style of the late 1920s. What critics find surprising about them, particularly the United Artists features, is not the lack of quality, but the absence of any identifiable Griffith trait. Only Abraham Lincoln and The Struggle (Griffith's two sound films) are recognizable as his works and are usually treated as early oddities '30..