Is Kubrick the most influential director of all time?

Griffith was (like Stroheim or von Sternberg) kind of an idiosyncratic dead-end. You could probably argue multiple of his disciples (like Walsh or Ford) or people like De Mille (yuck) shaped the direction film was going much more strongly. I don't want to underplay Griffith's influence. Griffith clearly influenced a lot of people in his day as is evident by the ridiculous number of Intolerance remakes, even by highly acclaimed directors (like Lang, Dreyer, Keaton, Murnau). However Griffith is much too idiosyncratic to really be (even close to) the most influential director of all time, let alone of his own era. Which living director is directly influenced by Griffith? The first one to come to mind is Straub. Is there any major established name at all that is really influenced by Griffith since like the 1930's or so? The modern day spectacles (the average Blockbusters) are not akin to Griffith, if anything they are akin to De Mille. Griffith framed action in wide open tableaus, punctuated by close-ups. It's almost as if the pictures take prescedence over plot. Think of the way he shoots the civil war in Birth of a Nation. There are silent-films that read like playbooks on how you would construct a scene today still but it's never Griffith's films, it's people like Fritz Lang (who for instance Nolan always claims as one of his prime influences). Few films feel like Griffith and those that take the most from him tend to be structuralists.

Griffith is one of the rare kind of directors who plays more to poetry and epos than to drama, he was in a way "outdated" by the early to mid 1920's or so. For all the stories about him at the end of the day Griffith was way too much one of his kind (and he caters to popular sentiment far too little) to really take on this role. Lang, Murnau, Wiene, Dreyer, Eisenstein, Keaton, etc. are both more watched by average people today and more likely to be studied or otherwise conciously or subconciously imitated by contemporary filmmakers (unless you're a structuralist I guess). There are lessons to learn from Griffith's films but if you look at the contemporary state of cinema, it's very evident that contemporary filmmakers don't learn these lessons. Rohmer's Astrea and Celadon has more to to with Griffith's Birth of a Nation (purely by the film language) than any actual recent film about the civil war has to do with it. I think much of the Griffith mythos stems from him claiming (to attract investors for his films) to have invented basic narrative practices that were popping up left and right independently of each other at the time. I mean the guy claimed to have invented the Close-Up for god's sake. The stuff that is really distinctly Griffith has rarely been copied after the silent age ended. The stuff he is usually credited for he did pioneer - but the entire industry back then was unchartered territory, everyone was a pioneer and I would personally always refer to the french (namely Melies and Feuillade) as being much more formally inventive. Feuillade's influence is usually understated, he was more prolific than Griffith too (outmatching Griffith by almost 200 credits in a shorter career) - and if you look at early Lang and Hitchcock it's distinctly Feuillade much more so than Griffith. Feuillade and Griffith are at the very least equally important but my impression was always that Griffith gets elevated so absurdly highly because the USA has been the (relatively undisputed) worldcapital of filmmaking since the 30's or something and he's the biggest thing the USA has to offer in that time - it reminds me of how we view the space-race today or how attitudes regarding WWII have shifted (in 1945 in France 57 % said the USSR contributed the most to win the war, 20 % said USA, in 2004, this was reversed, 58 % said USA, 20 % said USSR), USA simply has the best PR but some of it is fiction over fact. Griffith had a huge influence but he's not the father of cinema, that's bogus because he gets the credit of an entire generation, the entire generation of these filmmakers (Melies, Lumieres, Edison, Griffith, Feuillade, Sjöström, Pastrone, Christensen, Gad, Chaplin, Blache, Oswald, Rippert, Bauer, Stiller, Rye, etc., etc.) are the fathers of cinema.

Hitchcock and Godard make much more sense to me. I would probably say Hitchcock myself. I think when we speak about influence we should look at tangible things. Like for instance I've made things where I directly looked at how Rohmer, Huston or Murnau solved approached certain challenges. Otherwise you might as well say the Lumiere Bros but I don't think that makes sense. Again, obviously they are, like Griffith, super influential but not at all in the same league as Hitchcock. We can not soley credit the Lumiere's for inventing cinema when it was (much like with stuff Griffith claimed) a much broader thing that was happening but we can specifically credit Hitchcock with many things that people to this day lift directly from him. Our modern grammar of suspense is inseparable from Hitchcock for instance.

I think people underestimate Lang in this thread. Lang has been and continues to be extremely influential across the board. I'd probably say he's the most influential director who worked before Hitchcock (give or take Chaplin who obviously has more impact on the wider cultural sphere).