<P> It was during this period that camera effects intended to convey the subjective feelings of characters in a film really began to be established . These could now be done as Point of View (POV) shots, as in Sidney Drew's The Story of the Glove (1915), where a wobbly hand - held shot of a door and its keyhole represents the POV of a drunken man . The use of anamorphic (in the general sense of distorted shape) images first appears in these years with Abel Gance's la Folie du Docteur Tube (The Madness of Dr. Tube). In this film the effect of a drug administered to a group of people was suggested by shooting the scenes reflected in a distorting mirror of the fair - ground type . </P> <P> Symbolic effects taken over from conventional literary and artistic tradition continued to make some appearances in films during these years . In D.W. Griffith's The Avenging Conscience (1914), the title "The birth of the evil thought" precedes a series of three shots of the protagonist looking at a spider, and ants eating an insect . Symbolist art and literature from the turn of the century also had a more general effect on a small number of films made in Italy and Russia . The supine acceptance of death resulting from passion and forbidden longings was a major feature of this art, and states of delirium dwelt on at length were important as well . </P> <P> The use of insert shots, i.e. close - ups of objects other than faces, had already been established by the Brighton school, but were infrequently used before 1914 . It is really only with Griffith's The Avenging Conscience that a new phase in the use of the Insert Shot starts . As well as the symbolic inserts already mentioned, The Avenging Conscience also made extensive use of large numbers of Big Close Up shots of clutching hands and tapping feet as a means of emphasizing those parts of the body as indicators of psychological tension . </P> <P> Atmospheric inserts were developed in Europe in the late 1910s . This kind of shot is one in a scene which neither contains any of the characters in the story, nor is a Point of View shot seen by one of them . An early example is in Maurice Tourneur's The Pride of the Clan (1917), in which there is a series of shots of waves beating on a rocky shore to demonstrate the harsh lives of the fishing folk . Maurice Elvey's Nelson--England's Immortal Naval Hero (1919) has a symbolic sequence dissolving from a picture of Kaiser Wilhelm II to a peacock, and then to a battleship . </P>

Who is often credited with being the first modern director