cross cutting Cecil B. DeMille The Whispering Chorus film
After 1914, cross cutting between parallel actions came to be used –  more so in American films than in European ones. Cross-cutting was used to get new effects of contrast, such as the cross-cut sequence in Cecil B. DeMille's The Whispering Chorus (1918), in which a supposedly dead husband is having a liaison with a Chinese prostitute in an opium den, while simultaneously his unknowing wife is being remarried in church.
