The ``chase'' as a standard film device probably dates from The Great Train Robbery, and there is a reason for the continued popularity of the device. The chase in itself is a narrative; it presumes both speed and urgency and it demands cutting -- both from pursued to pursuer and from stage to stage of the journey of both. The simple, naked idea of one man chasing another is of its nature better fitted for the film than it is for any other form of fiction. The cowboy films, the cops and robbers films, and the slapstick comedy films culminating in an insane chase are not only catering to what critics may assume to be a vulgar taste for violence; these films and these sequences are also seeking out -- instinctively or by design -- the peculiarly cinematic elements of narrative.

There still remained the need for one great film artist to explore the full potential of the new form and to make it an art. The man was D.W. Griffith. When he came to the movies -- more or less by accident -- they were still cheap entertainment capable of enthralling the unthinking for an idle few minutes. In about seven years Griffith either invented or first realized the possibilities of virtually every resource at the disposal of the film maker. Before he was forty Griffith had created the art of the film.

Not that there had not been attempts, mostly European, to do exactly that. But in general the European efforts to make an art of the entertainment had ignored the slowly emerging language of the film itself. Staggeringly condensed versions of famous novels and famous plays were presented. Great actors and actresses -- the most notable being Sarah Bernhardt -- were hired to repeat their stage performances before the camera. In all of this extensive and expensive effort, the camera was downgraded to the status of recording instrument for art work produced elsewhere by the actor or by the author. The phonograph today, for all its high fidelity and stereophonic sound, is precisely what the early art purveyors in the movies wished to make of the camera. Not surprisingly, this approach did not work. The effort produced a valuable record of stage techniques in the early years of the century and some interesting records of great theater figures who would otherwise be only names. But no art at all was born of the art effort in the early movies.