CL 3/26

The scene at 47:00 starts out with the use of IRIS to portray a family hiding away and then to broaden it up to show the vast amount of people and wagons in the valley below passing the burning house. I do believe they overused the use of iris in this scene… because they keep going in and out with it amongst various scenes that have chaos aprupting everywhere. It is supposed to be used to show importance of detail within or around the opening or opening or closing an important scene. In this case, the iris is just used randomly in my opinion, except for when it starts on the woman and her family sitting amongst the brush.

Parellel editing was used to show how while the confederacy or other southern peoples were burning down the lady’s house, they were at the same time destroying a small town somewhere else. (At least I think that is what I witnessed. It may of been a zoomed in version of them burning down her house).

Typage in this scene involves the lady in the beginning being viewed as poor. So this probably entises the audiences to view the southern people as barbarians with no hearts. The scene where people are riding wildly through the city-they are viewed only as shadow figures (black figures), giving the scene a more ominous feeling. Similarly, the costumes, as described are raggedy and shown to represent the chaos shown in the scene.

I assume after taking all of these film analysis into consideration, Griffith most likely wanted the audience to feel sorry for the woman and her homestead being burnt to the ground by confederate soldiers and other southern militia. Griffith also was trying to show the deviance of the confederates by creating the scene as barbaric and heart wrenching.

In the first scene of second set, the iris really doesn’t show until the lady is having some kind of fit on the ground, and even this shows a very faint black boarder ring around the scene, I guess indicating that the scene was not as important as others. In the second set of scenes, the iris was once again misused, I believe, in its attempt to show importance of the character’s position or the scene itself, especially when the radical was bowing toward the other gentleman. In the beginning, however, the iris displays a group of men on the left side, then blows up to view much more people in the room. Showing it wasn’t just a private meeting of 4 or 5 people, but a whole gathering of a large sum of people. This, in my opinion, would be a proper way of using the iris. Parallel editing was used to show in both scenes, the girl standing (and sitting) in one room, while the radical was proposing something in the other room. Typage and costume both displayed rich folks of course, except for the first scene when the girl was dressed in a type of house keeper uniform, and at the second scene she was dressed up in a gown and had a bunch of makeup on, indicating she had all of a sudden come into some money. It took me a second, but I came to realize that this was a mixed woman. Everyone in the scene, including the African American house keepers, or servants, were dressed in nice attire, displaying the importance of the social gathering and the high social class of the people that were most involved in the scene.

Griffith made this scene to indicate that if someone was biracial, then possibly it would be acceptable to conform them with white people in society. As we saw in the scene, all of the house servants were African Americans, but the one who wasn’t, ended up convincing the radical that she was no different than a white person.