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Editing in The Birth of a Nation

Page history last edited by Sam Webster 14 years, 4 months ago

The Birth of a Nation is often used to roughly establish the beginning of narrative film. What distinguishes this film from previous explorations in cinema was it's incredible, lengthy story told with the artful use of editing to create causal connections of events and establishing a very firm narrative. The narrative style of The Birth of a Nation is dependent on the editing used to relate individual shots into a firm and comprehensible storyline for audiences to follow. This page will analyze a few short clips from the film and discuss the technical methods used as well as aesthetic implications of those methods.

 

Inferring Transitions

 

An important part of building narrative through continuity editing, as Griffith did, was cutting shots together in ways that will help audiences infer connections between events. This clip holds two different ways Griffith helped his audiences understand the scene or follow the action through multiple shots.

 

 

Title cards appear as the first example of guiding audiences through the narrative of the film. Here, we see Gus captured by the white men searching for him. After they gain control over him, a title card appears saying "the trial." Following this shot, we see Gus again, in a similar position to when we last saw him being captured, but this time he is surrounded and subdued by members of the Ku Klux Klan. The title card here plays a transitional role, telling the audience of the change that has occured and moving them through the two shots with an explanation of the causal connection: Gus was captured, then put on "trial" by the Klan members. This method is effective and may have been necessary for the time period when audiences weren't used to watching a movie that operated in this way as we are so accustomed to now, but the next cut in this sequence is a much more subtle way of directing the audiences attention to something in particular.

As Gus is being held by the Klan members, Griffith makes a cut to Elsie, now deceased, though she is nowhere near the scene that is occuring. Griffith does this as an alternative to title cards, showing rather than telling that this trial is for Gus' potential murder of Elsie. In lieu of a title card saying "You murdered Miss Cameron," a shot of her body is placed in the scene in the hopes that the audience will infer that this image is what the Klan members are discussing in this "trial." This cut is an ideal example of continuity editing and gives the scene much more power with the image of a dead girl instead of a few words on a blank screen.

 

Setting the Mood

 

 

This sequence depicting the Lincoln assassination involves several important forms of continuity editing and, through these methods, creates the tension and chaos seen on screen for the viewers. First, multiple match-on-action cuts are made that lets viewers assume connections between seperate shots based on the action that flows through them: Boothe walking through the door, entering the balcony, jumping to the stage, etc. These are all important and basic shots used to describe the sequence of events by asking the audience to infer the connections that Griffith is trying to show. Among these match-on-action shots, however, Griffith also cuts to a close-up of Boothe's gun in his hand before he enters the balcony. This stylistically different shot builds some anticipation for viewers and sets a tenser mood for the rest of the action sequences. Griffith also focuses on the gun to set it firmly in the viewer's mind of just what Boothe's intentions are, and in some ways, this shot could be considered foreshadowing, giving the audience a clue as to what action may occur next.

One of the most important match-on-action shots in this sequence shows Boothe jumping from the balcony and landing on the stage in two different shots. At first, we're close to Booth in the balcony, still with Lincoln, but the second shot shows Boothe jumping into a much wider shot so that we are not only seeing Boothe's action, but his actions from the balcony are drawn down with him into the main theatre hall and we see the chaos occurring in the audience of the play as a direct result of Lincoln's assassination.

 

 

However, Griffith's editing doesn't always create tension in the scenes. Often in The Birth of a Nation, he edits more personal or romantic scenes in ways that focus attention on the softer emotions that are apparent. While some of these cuts may be technically the same as those used for the much more chaotic and tense scene of Lincoln's assassination, their aesthetic implications differ greatly. The particular sequence above involves a very calculated formula of close-ups to set the rosy emotional tone and to give actors the opportunity to to express their emotions subtly in their faces, an acting style that was still developing at the time. The sequence begins with a close-up of slaves' hands picking cotton, soon followed by a close-up on a flower being held by the more affluent white male lead. This comparison uses the two close-up shots to equalize those two images, and the ideas associated with them, in the viewers' mind: the slave labor harvesting of the South's incredibly important staple crop and this beautiful flower held in the hand of a well-to-do white man. Griffith makes these cuts with direct intention to set the mood of a slave harvest in a better way and to convey the scene as being peaceful rather than oppressive. The next close-up seen here is an insert of the photograph of Elsie, and what follows is a medium close-up shot of the Cameron boy's reaction to seeing the picture. His face is extremely expressive here, and Griffith moves the camera closer to his face in order to capture those more subtle movements he makes, giving power to the performer in this short shot. The basic tenants of continuity editing allows the audience to connect the previous close-up of Elsie's photograph to the emotions expressed by Cameron in a straight-forward, causal manner, as is very condusive to the narrative style of The Birth of a Nation. That last close-up of Elsie also follows the trend of close-ups throughout the scene: slaves picking cotton seems somehow peaceful with the introduction of a flower, and Elsie completes that connection in her close-up to give the scene that romantic twist involving her and Cameron.

 

Paralleling Events

 

 

This final clip shows a style of editing that plays an imperative role in contemporary action films, and was used by Griffith in much the same way. The important cuts here show two completely different sets of action, occuring in two completely different locations, but cuts them together so as to give the effect that they are occuring simultaneously. Griffith uses this parallel editing to help audiences infer that, though the Camerons are trapped in an isolated cabin and under seige from the army of blacks, the Klan members are on the way for a valiant rescue. Unable to have a single shot of both the cabin and the Klansmen, miles apart, Griffith relied on the audience's ability to connect these two paralleled events as occuring simultaneously. Where a book might simply say, "Meanwhile...," Griffith had to come up with a way to edit these sequences together in a way that would make audiences connect these actions as simultaneous and related. At the end of the clip, the Klansmen finally arrive, effectively bringing those two paralleled sequences of events together in one single shot, verifying the audience's guesses about their relation.

 

Comments (1)

Sean Desilets said

at 9:36 pm on Oct 28, 2009

* Lots of "firm" in the first paragraph.
* This is a freaking great page.
* If anyone were to dare touch this masterwork, she should probably pay some attention to how Griffith edits in more intimate contexts--in the love scenes, perhaps, or the family scenes. Here, he uses lots of inserts and close-ups, for which he is know.

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