Scott Lord Silent Film: Annabel Lee and The Tell Tale Heart, The Avenging Conscience (D.W. Griffith, 1914)

Author Kenneth Macgowan praises the film "The Avenging Conscience",directed by D.W. Griffith and starring Blanche Sweet and Mae Marsh, as a photoplay, his view being that Griffith's film uses a narrative method of storystructure, action being secondary to character development,if not being interpolated between scenes, his noting that it was seldom that D.W. Griffith used intertitles with lines of dialougue during a scene.

Edward Wagenknecht, in his volume The Films of D.W. Griffith, looks at director D.W. Griffith the screenwriter, "There is an immense amount of going and coming throughout on the part of nearly all the characters, and in the first part they wander about at some legnth at an outdoor party being held in the beautiful gardens of a great estate, which has nothing to do with the story and which one suspects must have been included because Griffith had access to the estate." Wagenknecht sees the intertitles carrying literary quotations as being often misplaced, but in regard to the development of Griffith's career and the continuance of genre, "psychological pursuit is here substituted for physical chase so often associated with his films", perhaps the commodity involved with genre being identification with an adapted author within the emerging star system, Griffith an autuer of the historical drama.

The film was photographed by Karl Brown and G.W. Bitzer.

D.W. Griffith is credited with having directed the 1909 film "Edgar Allan Poe" starring his wife Linda Arvidson as the wife of poet, author Edgar Allan Poe.

Silent Horror D.W. Griffith and G.W. Bitzer

Scott Lord Silent Film: Lili Dagover in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Rob...

Arthur Knight, in his volume The Liveliest Art, views "The Cabinet of Dr. Calgari" as one of the most famous silent films ever made. Knight explains, "Two things distinguished 'Caligari' as a film: the daring of the story-within-a-story and the startling originality of its decor." Knight implies the thematic elements are articulated in the mise-en-scene of the film, remarking upon its "obviously 'artistic' settings (related nith to the stage work of the expressionists and to the experiments of the cubist painters". Leo Braudy, in his volume The World in a Frame, gives The Cabinet of Caligari, directed by Robert Wiene during 1921, as an example of a "closed film", where the director creates his own space, a unique and specific diegetic backdrop, as opposed to an "open film" where the story finds it own enviornment in which events are to take place. Not only is characterization what allows narrativity, but where the stage us set allows theme and mood to carry the storyline.

Despite how invaluable the view of Expressionism given by Bela Belaz in his volume Theory of Film might proove, he gives an impression on the genre the enters into a summary. "Expressionism in the film has many degrees, from the expressivity of the theme, where style is determined merely by the collating of curious motives, surroundings and background, to the complete and pure expressionism embodied in the famous 'Cabinet of Dr. Caligari', which deserves a chapter itself in the history of film art and inwhich the physiognomy and mimicry of things achieved the same democratic animation as the faces and guestures of the human characters."

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Scott Lord Silent Film: Death’s Marathon (D.W. Griffith, 1913)

During 1913, Blanche Sweet appeared in several films for director D.W. Griffith at Biograph, including the presumed lost silent film "Love in an Aoartment Hotel", the presumed lost silent film "A Chance Deception", the lost silent film "A Stolen Bride", "Broken Wings", the presumed lost silent film "If We Only Knew" and ""Death's Marathon".