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
the state of the spectator and the question of universal language, as early cinema and mass culture critic Miriam Hansen has noted. In Griffith’s years, film was meant to connect emotionally with the spectator so that they would stay engaged in the fiction, and when Vertov’s work came to be, film engaged with people through enlightening them to reality. However, in the end, both filmmakers presuppose one audience devoid of differences, as understood in Hansen’s critique, and showcases the blind spots in their intentions.
Griffith’s techniques made it possible for people to understand his films clearly, with every scene being meaningful and significant to the plot, and this allowed them to detach from the real world to invest in his own.
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
standing.
By contrast, Dziga Vertov’s Kino Eye and Man with a Movie Camera meshes multiple film fragments into one to make concrete items abstract, indiscernible from just the eye, and consequently makes itself as close to the reality he experienced as possible.
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
his documentary. Furthermore, in Man with a Movie Camera, he takes various shots of different places and of cameras, the theater, even the set up scene when putting on a film in order to show the audience this separation between them and the film. Taking into consideration the differences between a camera and a human eye, Vertov believed that the human eye would distort what they saw. On the other hand, the camera holds no judgment or bias towards any object, thing, or person, and so it would be able to film the world as it was. The image of the camera in Man with a Movie Camera signifies the ability to take hold of the world and organize it in an understandable and permanent manner, whereas with a human, at some point, part (if not all) of the information would become forgotten or misconstrued. This distinction between the editing styles each filmmaker uses demonstrates how Griffith and Vertov develop spectatorship. For Griffith, he embraces the spectator and removes them from their reality in order to keep them interested in his fictional stories. But for Vertov, he forces the spectator to realize they cannot simply watch the cruelties that occur in reality.
Although this difference is notable between Griffith and Vertov’s styles, Hansen points out that the filmmakers’ ambitions to link their films with society in some shape or form rely on an assumption that film is a medium in which everyone stands equal to each other, a “universal language”: “By taking class out of the working class and ethnic difference out of the immigrant, the universal-language metaphor in effect became a code word for broadening the mass-cultural base of motion pictures in accordance with middle-class values and sensibilities” (Hansen 78). Griffith’s films consisted of no sounds of conversation or voices, and it allowed other people from around the world to understand the story in which he wanted to convey; An Unseen Enemy, the reactions on the actors and actresses’ faces by themselves allow the viewers to understand, making it so that anyone, no matter ethnicity or status, would be able to find enjoyment. But as the film industry has evolved, it cut off the involvement between the spectator and the film in which “[whether] used in a critical or an affirmative sensor terms like the illusion of reality or ‘invisibility’ of technique, or the ‘transparency’ the new universal language were as inaccurate then as they are now” (Hansen 81-82). Hansen critiques Griffith and Vertov’s works with ambitions to bring people together. Rather than older audiences being a spectator who watched films as entertainment, the connection made in modern film now has become endless consumption; the screens push specifically edited images and subjective ideas into our minds, leading film to become a form of advertising more than anything else.
. From this, Hansen argues that although these films might have become a universal language in terms of communicating, it does so by grouping everyone together, disregarding their differences: “…the defense of film as a universal language plays upon the utopian vision of a means of communication among different people(s). At the same time it foreshadows the subsumption of all diversity in the standardized idiom of the culture industry, monopolistically distributed from above” (Hansen 76). Although the idea promotes unity to some degree, the truth of the matter is that advertisements in the “cultural industry, monopolistically distributed from above” only require consumption to satisfy their needs, and who it comes from is of no importance. Yet, while the film industry declares it makes everyone equal, it separates people even more through class and ethnicity; it determines who is able to become the spectator by virtue of when, where, and how it is played. Although these films attempt to shrink all the ethnicities of the viewers into one whole, they actually go against that idea and in fact make the audience more separated because there are too many differences for a middle ground to satisfy them all. The “utopian vision” that Hansen criticizes, then, has never existed and never will, especially not through film. Griffith and Vertov’s intentions for their films contrasted with one another greatly. Griffith’s desire to capture the audience’s attention for the entire length of his work comes through in the techniques he used, which created compelling scenes. In contrast, Vertov’s use of montage refuses to allow the audience to remain as just a spectator to the content of his works. Despite both their ambitions, Hansen’s critique of the film industry’s underlying motivations for advertisement and consumption reveal flaws in the predicted scope of these films. Ultimately, while Griffith and Vertov succeeded in their desires to a certain degree, it only includes a limited audience.