Forget Wes Anderson and Michel Gondry. You can even forget Gus
Van Sant, Lars von Trier and David Lynch (keep the sexy bits
from Mulholland Drive though. That is irreplaceable). The
director you really need to know is D.W. Griffith. The man
invented a crucial filmmaking technique that is now taken for
granted right across the medium. You know how an actor walks off
screen to the right and then walks on in the next frame from the
left and you know he’s entered another room? Griffith was the
first to do that. He invented that shit. D.W. Griffith is
probably most famous for his 1915 film The Birth Of A Nation
which is an incredibly long epic about the American Civil War
and the birth of the Ku Klux Klan. However, in 1912 he made a
short film called The Sunbeam, a film about the shenanigans of
the residents of a tenement building and an unlikely romance
which serves as a neat warning not to get locked up somewhere
with a repulsive member of the opposite sex for too long. Now —
one hundred years after it’s creatio