A concise depiction of a struggling agrarian family, A Corner in Wheat is also one of the most forceful demonstrations in early cinema of the power of parallel editing to connect events spatially and morally. Director D. W. Griffith's eloquent depiction of the rural landscape owes much to the nineteenth century Realism of Jean-François Millet as well as the conventions of Romantic landscape painting. The cross-cutting Griffith introduced in his Biograph films of 1909 shaped the development of cinema worldwide.