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Which D.W. Griffith film first used parallel editing between two storylines?
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D.W. Griffith
D.W. Griffith.
D.W. Griffith first practiced parallel editing between dual narratives in his 1908 film After Many Years.1
While earlier filmmakers like Edwin S. Porter experimented with elements of continuity and crosscutting in films such as The Great Train Robbery (1903), Griffith is recognized for rationalizing these techniques and developing them into a fundamental structural principle of narrative cinema. Following his work on After Many Years, Griffith further refined this technique in 1909 with The Lonely Villa, where he expanded the method to represent three simultaneous actions.12