A Comparison Of Birth Of A Nation And The Battleship Potemkin

Though there are many differences between the two silent films Birth of a Nation, directed by D.W. Griffith, and The Battleship Potemkin, directed by Sergei Eisenstein, it takes a big tole in the similarities that are the most captivating. The directors in these films truly get the audience to participate in an active role while still paying attention to the films. The directors chose to include historical events while building cyphers incorporated in the plot. While Birth of a Nation reiterates these themes, Potemkin introduces a different approach. Both Battleship Potemkin and The Birth of Nation are films that examine prime examples of civil conflict in different chapters of political insecurity in a historical setting. Both these films
In Birth of a Nation, when we see a close-up of Lillian Gish’s face, we immediately have the view of a squirrel. The way Griffith set this up is very poetic because it implies the connection between the purity and gracefulness of a white southern girl and the squirrel. Eisenstein uses a different approach. He uses a boiling pot during the riot to intensify the men before going into battle. Although they use different techniques, they both give the audience a reaction, which keeps the audience wanting to know
For Eisenstein, meaning in cinema lay not in the individual shot but only in the relationships among shots established by editing. Translating a Marxist political perspective into the language of cinema, Eisenstein referred to his editing as "dialectical montage" because it aimed to expose the essential contradictions of existence and the political order. Because conflict was essential to the political praxis of Marxism, the idea of conflict furnished the logic of Eisenstein's shot changes, which gives his silent films a rough, jagged quality. His shots do not combine smoothly, as in the continuity editing of D. W. Griffith and Hollywood cinema, but clash and bang together.”