Actually, I'm not as impressed by the cross-cutting as I am by the naturalistic acting and the use of depth (two other "inventions" often credited to Griffith). And yes this is, almost shot for shot, The Lonely Villa.

Yes, I love this film, have seen it many times. Isn't it mostly Griffith's work on Birth of a Nation that earns him that reputation, of inventing cross-cutting? Eisenstein and many others, even people like Oscar Micheaux, appear to have attributed this invention to Griffith based mostly on Birth of a Nation, as far as I understand. And ,while it's true that this and other Pathe films are similar in structure to The Lonely Villa,I still think that, overall, Griffith's oeuvre and its evolution really focused on and developed the technique of cross-cutting in a way that no other single person did. Another thing that is important about Griffith's films and his use of cross-cutting is the way in which gender and race were integral to the narrative structure that he is famous for. In this 1908 Pathe film,it is a boy with his matronly mother who are in danger, whereas almost immediately the figure who is in danger in Griffith's works, who must be "saved," is a delicate, beautiful, "virginal" woman. Thus, Lillian Gish stars in "An Unseen Enemy," with her sister, as the endangerd woman (the implication being ,of course , her vulnerablity to rape) who must be rescued by the white man. Just a few years later, that trope, and the figure of the white woman who is in danger of being defiled by the Black man,is central to the much more complex structure and use of cross-cutting in a filmlike Birth of a Nation and also Broken Blossoms, where the dangerous perpetrator is Asian rather than Black or Mulatto. So, it seems to me that the discussion of cros-cutting can't really be separated from the "ride to the rescue" narrative structure that is still, to this day, such a key part of so many feature films in Hollywood especially.

I think the point is that Griffith used the technique at volume and scale in films that people remembered. I would never say that he 'invented' it, but the term 'pioneer' is a bit more semantically open (not that I use that either). There's a great article by Barry Salt called "What Griffith Really Did" that looks at some of the key elements of craft he can be fairly associated with him. I'd say, in fairness, that most actual teachers of Early and Silent Cinema wouldn't be as loose with language as broad popular histories of cinema, and, likely, most of the folks in this group would be careful too! :)

André Gaudreault wrote a lot about the history and theory of « montage alterné », including this very example.

Ref. to: traumundexzess.com/2013/01/19/histoire-d-un-crime-r-ferdinand-zecca-p-pathe-f-15445000/

Ref. to Le Médecin du Château - you find the whole story in extension in my book "Traum und Exzess", Vienna 2011, incl. it's relation to Griffith and his 1909 film "The Lonely Villa". The only problem is that I wrote my book in German. Sorry for that.