Perhaps the power of the Director is best illustrated when a movie by a particular director is recognized only by some signature trait. Often when seeing an older film on television it is possible to recognize the style of many directors. Whether it is lighting, camera angle, or non-linearity in plot, these traits are often what make a directors work watched. The power of directors may lay in the fact that like a manic composer they take basic elements that make up a film and must put them together in a way that makes not only sense, but art. Much like the power a writer may feel in making up stories and characters, the Director by virtue of position has an almost unbridled opportunity to build a film from the ground up.
The directors craft developed through early film history like all the other parts of film craft, by fits and starts. With the institution of studios the directors position became codified under the watchful eye of the producers who want to make as many films as possible but didn't have time to oversee each one personally. Directors began by carrying out the wishes of the producers, but a few became powerful enough to introduce their own innovation into their work. D.W. Griffith, though reprehensible as a human being developed many staples of film that are still in use today. His effective use of close ups became the basis of many later directors styles. James Whale's use of a segmented tight close up in the movie "Frankenstein" when the Monster is first seen, is a shot that many directors have used for a powerful accent in their own films. Perhaps the most famous use was by Stanley Kubrick in "2001" when HAL the manic computer used a space pod to attack Poole outside of the ship.
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