In 1915, DW Griffith made The Birth of a Nation, which not only earned huge box office revenue, but also earned Griffith an extraordinary social reputation. Therefore, full of ambition, he made a film with richer content, grander scenes, and more mature skills a year later, and it was also the film that best represents his artistic level.
But the reality is different from his imagination. Compared with the high investment (one and a half years of production, two million US dollars investment, 220 minutes in length), it is a real box office fiasco, and he is burdened with a lifetime of debt. . On the contrary, this film inspired colleagues in the film industry at that time to develop a complete set of film shooting skills, and Griffith was also called "the father of modern film" by later generations.
Today, when we watch this movie again, we will be amazed at its greatness. I will also be amazed how Griffith, in the face of technical limitations and no reference, can shoot such a work with such a grand scene and profound content. In this first epic film in film history, we have seen the correct application of classical editing, the emotional rendering of parallel montage and cross montage, the spatio-temporal connection caused by multi-line narrative, the emotional explosion caused by the "last minute" technique, and the There are applications with blocked shots and close-up flashbacks, the unique effect of coloring to create an atmosphere in the silent film era, and the epic Babylonian offensive and defensive battle.
It is worth noting that most of the cinematic techniques in this film, such as montage, multi-line storytelling, and the use of occluded shots and close-ups, are in the service of or caused by editing. The most commendable thing about this film is that it develops the skills and functions of editing. A series of film techniques have been created with classical editing, and while shaping the effect of classical editing, new shooting methods have been developed, such as the application of close-ups and large vistas. Therefore, we look at the past and present of splicing and the development of montage from the "Party Dissent".
Before Griffith invented classical editing, continuous editing was common in the silent film era, and before that it was a sequence shot. Due to their short duration and lack of narrative, early films consisted of more than one segment shot, such as the famous "A Train Arrives at a Station". With the development, when the film gradually becomes narrative, it develops into continuous editing, which not only follows the discovery logic of things or movements, but also shoots and cuts on this basis. Therefore, the early continuous editing consisted mostly of segment shots and shot in medium shots. In this way, the development process of things and the behavior of the characters in the paragraph are guaranteed to the greatest extent. Such as "Journey to the Moon" (director George Méliès, the inventor of continuous editing, uses fade in and fade out to realize the editing process). Although close-ups were also used to shoot scenes later, there were only scenes with low mobility, because when the protagonist moved, in order to maintain continuity, there must be a series of shots to record this process, and this process will also change the film. Long and boring. In order to enhance the drama and rhythm, early silent films were all simple connections of passages.
Griffith's editing method is not like this. He does not rely on the internal connection of the characters' actions, but takes dramatic conflict and emotional expression as the primary goal. With this flexibility of purpose, he introduced the arrangement of close-up, long-range and medium-range shots, and created a variety of techniques such as reinforcement, contrast, and parallelism. It makes the director's ideas easier to express and easier for the audience to accept. As a result, editing has changed from a functional skill to a dramatic skill.
When conveying feelings to the audience, Griffith was able to use editing to continuously accumulate feelings, and dilute the objective time, supplemented by "last minute" emotional release, so that the audience can easily feel the director's purpose, and Feel more emotional impact. Because of this, Griffith kept switching scenes at the climax at the end of "Party and Differing", and constantly cut scenes in different scenes. Even in the last 20 minutes, he used 255 shots, so that the accumulated emotions finally burst out at the end of the event, causing a huge sense of agitation, which made the audience think.
In the interior of classical editing, when the effect of classical editing is produced, it is completed by switching between different shots. In order to create the effect of classical editing, Griffith invented many photography methods or gave new meaning to traditional photography methods, such as close-ups, long shots, blocked shots and flashbacks.
The incident is explained in a medium shot, followed by a close-up of the actor's face or other parts. This approach directly shows the actor's character's thoughts and attitude towards the incident. On the one hand, it allows the actors to express their emotions without relying on the traditional silent film performances of exaggerated actions, and also allows the director to make up for the deficiencies of the actors with skillful methods. The same is true for the vision. In the past, the vision was mostly used to explain the background, but in "Party to Fight Differing", Griffith placed the mid-level view of the conflict between two soldiers in front of the vision of the whole war, which strengthened the conflict and expanded this. The ferocity of war.
Another technique is partial occlusion, which is similar to a close-up, but is shot in a panoramic or medium shot, and then blocks other objects in the picture, leaving only the scene that needs to be expressed, thus forming an emphatic effect, and not with the The overall segmentation ensures the connection with the event. Therefore, when the middle shots of a shot are partially occluded one after another, the audience will be placed in the perspective of the protagonist, and the event will be conveyed emotionally, and they can also more directly experience the situation of the characters. This technique was developed by later generations into a method of constructing a new frame with objects in the picture, making the effect more prominent, the most famous being John Ford.
In one of the stories in the movie, Religious Holocaust, Griffith offers a new way of explaining why—flashbacks. When the villain wanted to find an excuse to slaughter infidels, Griffith inserted a picture of the villain's religion being slaughtered to find an excuse for the slaughter. Griffith's editing technique breaks the constraints of time and space, changing the narrative style of silent films, connecting cause and effect. Both intensify the effect of the event and simplify the process, and this technique directly inspired Eisenstein to invent the love splicing method.
It is precisely because of the innovation of the internal methods of classical editing that the pictures have brought new meanings and emotions, and Griffith has inadvertently invented a new technique of film techniques - montage (meaning editing in French), which now refers to the combination of different shots. They have different meanings when they come together. It can also be said that classical editing creates a montage effect to express the director's thoughts and thoughts conveniently.
In "Party to Fight Differing", Griffith not only used classical editing, but also used "classical editing" between paragraphs and within paragraphs, both parallel and cross-splicing, and even relying on action-point editing in action scenes.
There are a total of four stories in "Party Dissent". Griffith did not use the method of gradually connecting the story and the story, but relied on the development process of the events to find out the law between the events, and then spliced the similar processes together in parallel. Connect with the lens of the mother and the cradle. This amplifies the emotion and makes it easier to arouse the viewer's emotions. It also creates a sense of grandeur in time and space, allowing the theme of "Party to fight against differences" to travel through the four ancient and modern times, forming a greater screen power.
Parallel splicing also creates the effect of contrasting splicing. In "Party Dissent", Griffith uses a total of two kinds of contrasting splicing. One is outside the paragraph, which is the comparison between the four stories, and the other is the cross-contrast between the rescue of the husband and the execution of the husband in one of the stories, and the husband goes home to rescue the husband in the "Religious Holocaust". The cross splicing with the killing of his wife and parents. The effect is similar to the classical splicing, both for the maximization of emotions and the profound display of the theme, as well as the unique repetition of the motif. And from the effect, Griffith succeeded , and an unprecedented achievement.
Parallel splicing and contrast splicing endow the picture with the meaning of the actual representation, which leads to the two concepts of parallel montage and contrast montage. This technique makes it easier for the director to use the language of the film to tell his own thoughts, freeing himself from the dilemma that he can only use actors to reflect the content.
In the works after "Party to Fight Differing", the editing method was influenced by Griffith's editing method, and the editing according to the director's requirements became the mainstream. Among its descendants, the biggest image is the montage theory of the Soviet school, of which the most famous are universal editing and love editing.
The Platts splicing method (proposed by Pudovkin, also known as constructive splicing, believes that every shot has meaning, emphasizing the meaning of the "juxtaposition" of two shots) that "movie is both a form", so in this splicing method In the middle shot, close-ups are often used to express meaning, and emotional shots are often inserted into close-ups of things in the scene to show emotion. This splicing method is a further development of Griffith splicing, the most famous representative of which is Hitchcock.
Eisenstein's splicing method (the founder is Eisenstein, who believes that splicing should break space and time and make it sharply collide) that the connection between shots should be a relationship of 1+1>2, so Eisenstein sometimes inserts irrelevant between shots. It gives people a unique feeling, and gives a shocking depiction of the concrete condensation of a certain situation or state.
It is worth pointing out that splicing is a technique that tends to be formalistic. The scene he sets off is actually passed on to us by the director. It makes the event tend to a certain direction, and only strengthens one or some factors, making it lost. reality. Therefore, the French film theorist Bazin believes that editing will break the effect of the show and destroy the complexity of reality. It is also for this reason that most realistic literary and artistic films are shot in the form of a long shot, in order to restore the factuality of life.
But on the other hand, this splicing technique works surprisingly well in commercial films. Commercial films are originally intended to exaggerate a certain emotion to resonate with the audience, so the application of editing makes it easier for commercial films to convey emotions and express dramatic effects.
When looking back at the box office failure of "Party to Fight Differing", you will find that this is also a defect of classical editing, and it happens to be different from continuous editing. It is to break the continuity of things and break the inner connection of things, which was not tolerated by the audience at that time. But today the multi-line narrative caused by editing has become one of the advantages of many movies, and it has also produced many surprising effects. But there are also films that do not carry out multi-line narratives according to their own requirements.
It needs to be pointed out that the classical cut is not the first time it is used in "Party Dissent", Griffith uses this method in "The Birth of a Nation". Also, contemporaneous filmmakers were making similar attempts, extending their own techniques to create films, but the newspaper industry owned by Griffith was also biased to attribute it all to him. What Griffith is really good at is that he has huge artistic ambitions, he has made others integrate and develop film techniques, made "Party to Fight Differing", let the classical editing take shape, and put the film into the scope of art in one fell swoop, this is his The greatness of it is also the meaning of "Party to Fight Differing".
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