Comparing The Works Of Griffith And Vertov

D. W. Griffith, one of the earliest American directors and producers, uses close up and parallel editing to cultivate a deep emotional connection between the audience and his film An Unseen Enemy. As the industry developed, however, influenced directors would strategically involve the spectator, and vastly different filming methods were created, like the montage in Dziga Vertov’s Kino Eye and Man with a Movie Camera. Vertov’s usage of the newly invented montage contrasted with Griffith’s desire to create an escapist world in films by showing the lives of the citizens in the Soviet Union he lived in, highlighting the reality of their state, not the entertainment. The creation of these techniques in Griffith and Vertov’s works has thus altered
It gave older cinema an opportunity to have a connection with the audience, and examples of this appear in An Unseen Enemy, such as when the maid tries to shoot the two sisters from the other side of the wall. When the maid aims into the keyhole of the door, the gun points directly at the camera, forcing the spectator to become one of the targets inside the film. The gun also takes up most of the frame via the technique of close up, and the audience pays attention to every detail, from the dark doorknob hole to the hand holding onto the gun, adding onto the feeling of immersion. On one hand, this style of editing links the two shots, making it easy for an audience to understand what was happening in the scene because of parallel editing, which places multiple scenes from different places together to make it seem as if they occur simultaneously. At the same time, because the spectator becomes so involved in the film, the audience escapes from their reality and so experience the same film from an equal
Vertov did not want to make films to tell stories of fictitious characters to entertain. Instead, he believed that they should be documentaries, recordings of reality. As Griffith tries to hide the camera away from the spectator in order to make them feel involved, then, Vertov does the complete opposite by showing the camera within the film; this produces an effect where the spectator feels cut off and unable to simply watch his films. Rather than being only a spectator to the suffering and pain that happened in the Soviet Union in his time, the audience becomes like one of the citizens, confused and out of place, and as a result comes to a greater understanding of its grim reality. When using Griffith’s editing style of take in the spectator, it brings them into a film that would conceal them from reality. Not only that, but when using montage, with multiple scenes put together, people were able to see pieces of reality from around the Soviet Union. In the film Kino Eye, he displays multiple lives of children, mothers, workers, and merchants as they shop in open markets or show how they work. This viewing was to inform people about what was going on in the Soviet Union and try to make them empathize with the people within