I found this video helpful when looking when watching the DW Griffith films ‘The Birth of a Nation” and “Intolerance” – it sumerised the build-up of cinema style in those early years showing how Editing developed to create these early narrative films. It helped keep my attention on the subtleties, that I could have easily missed.

This first part of section 3 has been and interesting journey to a part of cinema I have not given much thought to previously. The only early cinema I have watched previously was the silent films of Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and others.

Reflecting back to these early days you can see that the origin of cinema was not fiction but documentaries. As cinema as an art grew, it became a medium for filmmakers to be put forward their idea to the public as a whole. It was used to a political tool especially around the First World War and the recovery afterward. It does not feel though as represents the people opinions, more the particular filmmaker’s idea of what we want to see – not always political a hasten to add.

There were vast changes in the style of this time with the birth of editing and narrative style, and there is a more risqué film to many of the films in comparison to only a few years later when they were under the confines of the Hayes Code. That is not that the films were openly explicit, just a little more “grown-up,” compared to the movies of the post-WW2 war era, that sometimes became pastiches of themselves by trying to be sensational.

In its earliest days cinema was a spectacle and over the first quarter of a century, it moves through many stages from spectacle through informative to narrative entertainment. However, spectacle remained in these early days as I have commented in “The Birth of a Nation” perhaps it was the spectacle of seeing a sprawling three-hour narrative – lead to the fact that such a grossly racist, historically inaccurate film could become the world first blockbuster?
The early days of cinema were a place for artistic endeavor; it is silly to ask the question where would be today, but they did just push the envelope quickly. Has any art form gone through as large and fast development as cinema did it is early years? I doubt it.

The biggest thing this I take from silent cinema is its ability to experiment and change quickly. What I don’t like it that it was very much telling me what I should be watching and what I should be thinking. In the modern world we can balance this with other media, but in 1915 I might have believed that “the Birth of a Nation” was historically correct.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/08/holl-a05.html

The above two articles a view of how the film industry was affected by WW1 from 2 very differing opinions.

I his 2000 Article in the New York times Stuart Klawans runs through how the war affected filmmakers on a personal level, especially as they edited and screened footage for public consumption.

Filmmakers were in fact thrown in a metaphorical front like as the witnessed, the death and destruction of the Great War unfold in the footage before their eyes. They had to decide what could be shown and what couldn’t and who to show this in a positive way to keep moral.

This as well as other fundamental changes to the structure of the cinema because of the changes happening in the world, including the shift of the French industry to a smaller more artisanal business.

Max Alvarez in his 2010 article for the World Socialist website, takes a different view on how the cinema industry changed “cinema has an imperialist weapon”; suggesting that the type of film emanating from Hollywood was designed to help bolster President Woodrow Wilson agenda for the USA entering the war in 1917. Keeping the public’s support and the studio we complicit in this propaganda as they the studio owners were majority European immigrants and wanted to show their support to their adopted country.

Stars we used by the government to aid recruitment and raise war funds Hollywood certainly played a part in the first world war and the first world war played a role in Hollywoods development.

Strangely WW1 never has been a large subject matter for Hollywood or cinema as a whole – why that would be I do not know. Perhaps 20 years was too short of a time for the juvenile film industry to come to term with such a global conflict before the globe was thrown into another.

Edwin S Porter (1870 -1941) was one of the first film makers to understand that a single shot was just the basic building block of film and it was the organisation or editing of these shot that gave films dynamism. An American

This 2 best known pieces of work are:

The Life of an American Fireman (1903)

and:

The Great Train Robbery

Starting to move away from the tableau style of earlier George Melies, these films introduced some of the basic convention of film editing that we know today.

“The Life of an American Fireman” was stock footage from the Edison company where he worked and using basic editing techniques he created a basic narrative structure. It still had an tableau style using Temporal overlaps in the cutting process (a Mini flashback) i.e shot of firemen going down the pole, the a shot of the empty pole before the fireman start coming down. Audiences did not question this, style of editing as the audiences we still pretty much amazed by the spectical over a moving picture.

However, within a year audiebce sophistication was increasing and Porter produced “The Great Train Robbery” this introduced cross cutting, double exposure, camera movement and location shooting and pushes the narrative form much further for the audiences. The film jumps between shots without fades and dissolves and scenes are cut before the reach at natural end the beginning of using editing to compress time – impact over reality.

Porters work as started to establish the language of film that we understand today and as suggested in the opening sentence of this post Porter established that it was not the scene that was the basic block of film but the single shot and how they are arranged in time.

Porters work only took film editing so far and it was an employee D.W. Griffiths who made big strides in completely moving movies out of the tableau to the multi-shot multi camera mediun we would recognise today.

Griffith invented the “cut-in” moving a long shot to a tighter shot of the actors in a scene to stress the emotional significace of the exchange – this was first used in the “The Greaser Gauntlet” (1908). He continued to develop using multiple camera set up and shot lengths creating “continuity editing” – a cutting style that maintains a sense of continuous space and time and crearing the 180° rule moving camera on a axius of action to avoid continuity errors.
Griffith alos invest the intercut or cross cut – that is movinbg between different scenes in parallel action. Firsr used in “After Many Years” were he showed a shipwrecked man and the woman he left behind. Griffith used this method of cutting to up the tension of the scenes be buikding up the tempo of the cuts as scene in “the lonely villa” (1909).

This continual experimentation lead to the the concepts that we know of today:
Establishing shots
Reverse shots
Matching Eyelines
Cutting on action.

Griffith eventually branched out on his own and produced the world most expensive film todate, “The Birth of a Nation” (1915) this was the world first blockbuster but was widely condemned even during it original release.

Despite it subject matter “The Birth of a Nation” is a hiostorically important piece of cinema it is the cumunnation of all of Griffith earlier work and experimentation and creates and feature film tin the style that we would recognise.

Unfortumnatelty, Griffiths not understand this claims of racium against his film and regarded the critisum as intolerance. Partially to silience his critics he followed up a “Birth of a Nation” with “intolerance” a spralling epic that intercut 4 different stories and cost over USD2.5Million. Unfortunatle this was not as well received as “the Birth of a Nation” failed at the box office.

Griffith will remain a controvertial figure in film history due to the subject matter of “ The Birth of Nation” however, it cannot be denighed his did almost single handedly invest cinema ediuting as we know it today.

Synopsis

The Stoneman family finds its friendship with the Camerons affected by the Civil War, both fighting in opposing armies. The development of the war in their lives plays through to Lincoln’s assassination and the birth of the Ku Klux Klan.

Review

“Birth of a Nation” is a difficult film to view as it is terribly racist; however, this racism has to acknowledged and looked past to understand its historical significance. As quoted in Time Magazine “100 years later Still Great, Still Shameful.”

Overall the film is a story how the American Civil War affected the lives of everyone in the USA. How it separated friends and families often pitting them against each other. The film is a sprawling epic over 3 hours in length, and Director Griffith used all his collected skill to create a film with narrative structure, drama and tension.
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This movie employs all the techniques Griffith had been perfecting over his years at Biograph:
• the use of ornate title cards
• the particular use of subtitles graphically verbalising imagery
• its original musical score, written for an orchestra
• the introduction of night photography (using magnesium flares)
• the use of outdoor natural landscapes as backgrounds
• the definitive usage of the still-shot
• elaborate costuming to achieve historical authenticity and accuracy
• many scenes innovatively filmed from many different and multiple angles
• the technique of the camera “iris” effect (expanding or contracting circular masks to either reveal and open up a scene or close down and conceal a part of an image)
• the use of parallel action and editing in a sequence (Gus’ attempted rape of Flora, and the KKK rescues of Elsie from Lynch and of Ben’s sister Margaret)
• extensive use of colour tinting for dramatic or psychological effect in sequences
• moving, travelling or “panning” camera tracking shots
• the efficient use of total screen close-ups to reveal intimate expressions
• beautifully crafted, intimate family exchanges
• the use of vignettes seen in “balloons” or “iris-shots” in one portion of a darkened screen
• the use of fade-outs and cameo-profiles (a medium closeup in front of a blurry background)
• the use of lap dissolves to blend or switch from one image to another
• high-angle shots and the abundant use of panoramic long shots
• the dramatisation of history in a moving story – an example of an early spectacle or epic film with historical costuming and many historical references (e.g., Mathew Brady’s Civil War photographs)
• impressive, splendidly-staged battle scenes with hundreds of extras (made to appear as thousands)
• extensive cross-cutting between two scenes to create a montage effect and generate excitement and suspense (e.g., the scene of the gathering of the Klan)
• expert story-telling, with the cumulative building of the film to a dramatic climax
And whether it is or is historically accurate – it looks it. Even today the footage look almost documentary in style, and it would have been astounding to the audiences of the day. Yes, the use of actors in “Black face” is outrageous however that is something we can see today. In 1915 even the most liberal of the viewers would have perhaps not even noticed as they marvelled at the movie picture.
The technical ability of Griffiths editing does give the film a modern feel at there is tension with the scenes parallel action is intercut together. In fact when this is the Klu Klux Klan riding to the rescue it does give us, a modern viewer, an uncomfortable feeling as we could be routeing for the wrong side.
Can the film be seen as propaganda for keeping the USA out of WW1? Perhaps it does show the destruction to people lives that war can bring. The film is shot from the point of view of the South (the Confederacy) and does portray Lincoln as using presidential power to subdue a sovereign nation’s (the Confederacy) wishes.
The film could have thrown seeds of doubts into the minds of the public as it does indeed not show the glory and patriotism of war that we saw in Love and Glory’ from the Spanish – American War.
Overall what “The Birth of the Nation” is a shame, grossly inaccurate but technically brilliant misrepresentation of US History. However, it should not be forgotten because cinema owes a great deal to it and its creator.

Interestingly the Spanish-American War was the first war to be covered by cinema cameras, and there is an extensive library of footage shot from the available at the Libriary of Congress (https://www.loc.gov/collections/spanish-american-war-in-motion-pictures/about-this-collection/).

These provide a fascinating insight into the origins of the recording of war – something that is now very familiar place, with images of conflicts around the globe transmitted into our home daily. It is often said that the first war to be fought in front of the camera was Vietnam, this show that this is not the case, merely the development of what had started many years ago with Edison and his peers.

These first images of conflict, do not show the conflict per se but related events. The movies start very much in the Lumiere mould of actualities with for example a single shot of newspaper correspondents running to file their story.

However, over time they developed a basic narrative structure in “Love and War” where the film over six scenes tell the story of a boy going off to war a private and returning triumphantly a hero promoted to captain.

What was the purpose of these films? Propaganda? Education? Entertainment? This is a difficult question. Given that cinema was a such a new technology – almost a magic box to those that saw it entertainment/spectacle had to be a driver; but no one goes to record war without wanting to produce propaganda or at the very least educate the viewers.

This propaganda hard to see in the actuality films from the Spanish -American War, however, in “Love & War” the propaganda element is evident to the viewers. “Love & War” shows how war has transformed our protagonist from lowly private to Triumphant Captain, winning the girl and the adulation of his family.

Films of WWI

Looking through the video on the Imperial War Museum’s website of the films made during World War 1 ; there is a definite shift towards propaganda. That is the film are made for a particular purpose and seem to show strength and the counties ability to win the war.

“American Troops in London” made the year America entered the war) show significant numbers of US troop marching through famous parts of London including taking a salute by King George V.
I film like this shown the British public demonstrates the arrival of the USA to the war, which was giving much-needed support to the British after close to 3 years of war with Germany.

World War 1 brought the British public together like never before, with a great sense of national duty. However, it did start to cause strains. A film like this shot but the Ministry of Information is clearly a morale booster. The first caption “HAIL COLUMBIA! Historic march through London of the first contingent of America’s great army”, show that that the America are a good boost. “LONDONS MIGHTY WELCOME. The Cheering crowd in Trafalgar Square” shows to the country at large the welcome they, have received in the Capital to encourage this to spread to the rest of the country. This welcome reinforced clearly showing a salute by the King and Prime Minister Lloyd George and many other dignitaries.

A day with the Welsh Guards” http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1060000204

This is an early example of a recruitment film. 13 scenes show the “good army life” (even showing pay day something that would be important the bread winners in working class areas who would be leaving job to join the Army), culminating in a recruitment plea, playing on national Welsh pride, not just British.

The wreckage of Schütte-Lanz SL11 at Cuffley. (http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1060005391)

This film shows the success of the allies of bringing down a Zepplin. The viewer is shown, the clearing of the wreckage; the captions explain how much was destroyed and captured. However, the film is very good natured in appearance the soldiers are smiling and happy in the work as are the images of the captured German Zeppelin crew there an amiable feel as if to show the viewers how pleasant an affable war was not showing the horrors the young men were experiencing in trenches.

Moving away from the films available at the IMW to Youtube this again expands on the images of war. Here are some more raw footage showing the action in brief clips.

The film above I don’t know its origin or original purpose, but it clearly shows the brutality of the first modern war.

Horses of WW1

Although edited in modern times the footage was shot as a documentary record of the war and is sobering, and illustrate. How unprepared the world was for WW1 – still reliant of horses at the same time as tanks, heavy artillery and warplanes were developed.

Perhaps the most moving of these is the film provided in the course notes

This film made by the US army in 1918 summarises WW1 and the US’s involvement in the conflict. This is quite a graphic film for its day showing the horrors of war, and it doesn’t shy away from the fact the war was hard.

It does show the US as the hero’s, arriving to help the struggling allies, and the captions do lean in that direction, but overall all the caption are positive, even when showing hard times.

The film is very much but together to show to the American public that while the war in Europe was hard the Americans were needed and it was a good cause.