The Journey Within: The Sealed Room (1909) & The

Avenging Conscience (1914)

Sayantan Dutta
Roll: 17
Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University
Paper: Hollywood and its Peripheries.

Question: Compare and contrast between D.W.Griffith’s one

Biograph shorts with one of his post-Biograph feature films in terms
of staging and editing technique mobilized. Write your critical
account with reference to entries to entries on your chosen films on
The Griffith Project (ed. Paolo Cherchi Usai) and other suitable
resources.
 Discourses on the transitional era within the history of cinema places D.W. Griffith
as one of the central protagonists who is responsible for a particular type of films situated
in a particular time in history. Emerging from a ‘cinema of attraction’, as Tom Gunning rightly
defines it1, Cinema was approaching in a form where narration was slowly becoming
important than the typical attraction like qualities of the Early Cinema. The period starting
roughly from 1907 represents ‘the true narrativization of the cinema’2, along with changes
in cinematic techniques that made the path clear for this new formal system. We’ll discuss
significant changes of techniques which filmmakers required to make a phenomenal shift in
the history of cinema and try to place Griffith’s two films in this context and locate their
journey of cinematic form. We’ll also focus on primarily two aspects, namely misen-en-scene
and editing, and shall try to locate the journey of Griffith’s film practice from a particular
point of time in history to another.
If we accept the definition of misen-en-scene proposed by Bordwell, (All of the
elements placed in front of the camera to be photographed, the setting, the props, lighting,
costumes and makeup, and figure and behaviour3) we’ll see that majority of ‘the cinema of
attractions’ were made precisely on this principle – the meaning was generated primarily
through the misen-en-scene. No significant development of editing was there in that
paradigm of filmmaking, at least we can say that filmmakers joined the shots not the same
way and not for the same purpose as they did in later period. Filmmakers of the Early Cinema
didn’t place two or more than two shots horizontally within a sequence, rather they focused
their attention on misen-en-scene, i.e. within the image, everything that happens in the
tableau to create meanings. Shots were changed only when they are called for - when the
sequence was changed. (Take, for instance, the example of ‘A Trip to the Moon’ (1902))
Unlike this, we’ve witnessed a shift in this principle where internal making of the
story called for new technique(s). Where storytelling was a matter of choice in Early Cinema,
this transitional phase witnessed a vivid growth of storytelling as necessity4, therefore
narration, where the previous technique couldn’t fulfil the demand. In order to tell a
comprehensible story, filmmakers had to change the form of telling. Although, as we’ll see,
a huge number of techniques absorbed in this phase were actually there in early period.
Staging the character in principles of tableau was one of them. Therefore, the time we are
discussing (first few years of Transitional Cinema) witnessed a dialectical mode of
representation, where staging and editing equally contributed to make the new narrative
form which was necessary in order to tell a story. As the techniques used by Hollywood in
its complete institutional form are largely different from this transitional era, this narrative
form bears characteristics which are unique and explicit in nature. We’ll try to find out its
proposed uniqueness through practical examples, from the first film I’ve chosen to study.

1
Tom Gunning, The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, its spectator and the Avant-Garde in Early Cinema,
Space, Frame, Narrative ed. Thomas Elsaesser with Adam Barker. (British Film Institute 1997)
2
Ibid. (Emphasize original) p.
3
Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. 2004. Film art: an introduction. Boston: McGraw-Hill. Glossary.
4
For various reasons, namely obscurity in terms of meaning, social pressure, gaining social respectability,
mimicking bourgeoisie tradition and therefore, to attract bourgeoisie middle class audience. I’m not going to
these aspects here in detail.
 The Sealed Room, made in 1909 is the first film I’ve chosen as the one-realer from
Griffith’s Biograph period. This film has quite a simple story of an illicit love affair which ends
in a violent revenge. Griffith had set the limit of just two contiguous rooms in a palace to tell
the story. Clearly, the story was based on the access and withhold of information – where
most of the information are given to the spectator prior to the characters. The central drama
is also based on this principle. Andre Gaudrault gives a useful synopsis, ‘The king, who did
not know that his wife cheated on him, now knows it. Besides he knows that the two lovers
are condemned since he engineered his revenge himself; the lovers themselves, who
thought they knew that the king knew nothing about their loves, will know only long after
the spectator knows it that their death is as close as it is inescapable.’5 However, what is told
here in terms of the ‘verb’ ‘know’, was told in the film almost entirely in cinematic language
without the help of infertile. We’ll try to locate the marks of it, along with the historical and
theoretical principles proposed in our discussion earlier.
In the film, this whole business of ‘knowing’ was represented in two distinct
movements. In the first five shots, (Shot 1-5) consisting almost 5 minutes of the screen times,
we first gained hints and then confirmation about the illicit love affair. Rest of the film
consisted of the affair and the revenge, which was manifested through 24 shots (shot 6-29).
Although, in terms of screen time, only 6 minutes were given for the second part. Apart from
the decreasing length of the individual shot, we see a significant shift of the narrative
technique within this film from the first movement to the second. I’ll argue that two different
kind of narrative techniques were used to bring out two different types of drama, (first the
drama of the illicit love affair, then the drama of revenge) and the first movement was
dominated by misen-en-scene as oppose to the second movement which depended on
editing to generate meaning. First movement of the film also acted out in a joined singular
space, whereas the second movement was divided into two distinct spaces (literally divided
by the brick wall), therefore reliance on editing was only logical to make meaning out of the
images. And also it is important to note, both the movements were composed in tableau
and no use of analytical editing, fragmenting the space was there.

First 5 Shots:

(1-3)

5
Gaudreault, Andre; The Sealed Room in The Griffith Project Volume 03 ed. Paolo Cherchi Usai. (British Film
Institute 1999) p. 24
(4-5)

As said before, in the first 5 shots, we learned about the illicit love affair between the
queen and the singer through the staging and the performance of the actors. First hint about
this came distinctly in the 3rd shot, where we see the singer staring at the queen with special
interest. Their glance meet when the king looks backwards, and it is interesting to note that
Griffith didn’t break the tableau structure, although the spectator is told where to look at
through the actor’s gesture. The major point is made through the facial expression of the
actors. (Fig. 1)

Fig. 1
After watching Griffith’s other films few years later and watching it in retrospect, we
might invariably expect that a close up of the action will be there which will separate and
emphasize the act of this affair. Although, this might be called as a proto-close up, where
the close up is there in principle but not in practice6, here we are forced to make meaning
out of misen-en-scene. In fact, for the first five shots alternating between two connected
spaces, no significant narrative information is given to the spectator through this alteration.
We can scarcely call this alteration following the definition suggested by Gaudreault and
Gauthier7 (we’ll discuss that in detail later). We can notice that the cuts used here are aligned
more with the editing techniques of early cinema, where shot changes are almost at par with
the sequence change. Here in the first movement, almost all the cuts (apart from shot 3 to

6
Discussed in Class with Prof. Subhajit Chaterjee on 29.08.19
7
Andre Gaudreault and Philippe Gauthier, D.W.Griffith and the Emergence of Crosscutting in A Companion
to D.W.Griffith ed. Charlie Keil (Wiley Blackwell 2018) p. 109
 4, which is, actually, not joined directly, but through an intertitle) happened because the
main character passed through the frame and entered in a different space. The act of the
love affair and the king’s suspicion - two major information of this movement was not
dependent on editing, rather the editing was motivated mainly through the actor’s changing
direction. Andre Gaudreault called these cuts as ‘actorial’ cuts, where, ‘the actor
systematically quits the field of vision in successive shots, thereby obliging the camera to
move from place A to place B, and bringing about, by necessity, a shift from one shot to
another’8.

Second 24 shots:

(6-8)

(9-11)

8
Ibid. p 114
(12-14)

(15-17)

(18-20)

(21-23)
(24-26)

(27-29)

In contrast to the first movement, the first cut (and all successive cuts) that happened
in the second movement, is not ‘actorial’ in nature. If we look through all the shots listed
above, we’ll notice a steady alteration happening through all of them – each cut is happened
because the spectator need to know the information which the characters within the story
didn’t know. The cut from shot 6 to 7 (the lovers are in the room, meanwhile the king comes)
underlines it, where the lovers didn’t know that they are going to be caught, the king didn’t
know the lovers are there. The spectator are given this information prior to all the
characters, by someone who tells the story. Apart from the fact that this cut is defined as a
‘narratorial cut’9, for the first time in this film we are witnessing the role of the underlying
narrator10 who tells the story and makes his presence felt. This underlying narrator, who first
emerged distinctly with this shot, is important for us to understand the transitional cinema
in general and Griffith’s films in particular. By the use of this technique ‘narratorial cut’, ‘one
senses, then, the intervention of the storyteller, the manipulator of narrative signs’ 11 who
directly tells the spectator, directs his/her gaze across space giving an excess of information
which are not available to the characters within the story. This storyteller, the narrator,
however, is not the biological director of the film. Tom Gunning argued, ‘It is theoretically
important to avoid identifying a narrator with a biological person such as the author.

9
Ibid p. 116
10
Adnre Gaudreault and Philip Gauthier used this term to describe narratorial cut. Ibid. p. 116
11
Tom Gunning, Weaving a Narrative, Style and Economic Background in Griffith’s Biograph Films in Early
Cinema, Space, Frame, Narrative ed. Thomas Elsaesser with Adam Barker. (British Film Institute 1997) p. 341
Narrative discourse (i.e. narration) is made up of words and images, not flesh and blood’12.
This act of narration is also theorized by Gunning as Narrator System, ‘which creates the
sense of an intervening figure who has arranged the images on the screen in a particular
manner’13.
This narrator system is one of the supreme cinematic techniques of the transitional
era which is unique and explicit in nature, as I argued before. This underlying narrator was
not there in the Early Cinema, even in later period, it is not consistent within a single film of
our choice. We’ve seen that the first movement of The Sealed Room was edited not in the
same way the rest of the film was. Use of crosscutting (we’ll define it through Gaudreault
and Gauthier later) throughout this movement emphasized the important of editing to
generate meaning. Central drama of the sequence was created through editing, through the
intervention of the active narrator, through the narrator system – unlike the first movement
(or in the Early Cinema), editing was used within a single sequence. Decreasing lifespan of
the lovers and increasing cruelty and sadism of the king are tied together through this
narrative technique. Griffith used the cinematic equivalent of the literal signifier
‘meanwhile’. A major shift has already happened between the narrative forms of these two
movements of the same film. We’ve reached from the first section dominated by misen-en-
scene to the second section dominated by editing.

Before going further to the next film of the post-Biograph period of Griffith’s
filmmaking career, I need to clear few more theoretical definitions here. As discussed in our
class through two films The Mothering Heart (1913) and The Country Doctor (1909), we
associated the narrator system with the morality and value which Griffith tried to bring
through different narratorial technique. (one of them being selective application of the
analytical editing in The Mothering Hear). Prof. Subhajit Chaterjee defined the idea of
narrator system as ‘the narrator produced as a result of technique to explicitly let you see a
series of abstractions and values being framed in screen’.14 We also discussed in the class
how this principle was not there in the Hollywood films of post 1917 age, where the narrator
becomes part of the narration, therefore the narrator cannot be separated from the
spectatorial perception.
If we take the examples of the two films stated above, we can clearly notice the
importance of the association of value with the idea of narrator system. In The Mothering
Heart Griffith employed analytical editing (i.e. fragmentation of space) in the scenes only in
restaurant. The same tableau principle was retained to underline the virtue of the age old
home, which the narration explicitly supports not only through the story, but also through
the technique. This use of technique as value was also manifested in The Country Doctor,
where the first and last shot of the film was two spectacular tracking shots not connected to
the rest of the film. One can make the meaning here only through an association of some

12
Tom Gunning, D.W.Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film (University of Illinois Press 1994) p.
23
13
Ibid. p. 25
14
Class with Prof. Subhajeet Chaterjee, 12.09.19.
abstract principle (can be supplementary of literary signifier ‘quotation mark’) which
withholds the whole film as timeless and a fable-like manifestation. Tom Gunning also
argued ‘Griffith’s narrative discourse expressed a range of moral judgements on his
characters (where) … editing predominantly plays this role in the narrator system’ 15. With
this examples, we can clearly notice the underlying narrator who not just joins shots, but
makes his present deliberate and explicit.
However, this association of narrator system with value is not the only manifestation
of narrator system in the Griffithian system. Taking clues from the literary critic Gerald
Genette, Tom Gunning clearly associates the idea of narrator system with many techniques
employed by Griffith, where morality and value being only one of them. Gunning associated
narrator system with the idea of characterization through composition and editing. More
importantly He also described the emergence of literary ‘tense’ in cinematic equivalent
technique through narrator system, which has nothing to do with the idea of value. I’ve to
quote Gunning at length as he described the point:
“The narrator system takes on a series of tasks in the realm of tense. As I stated
earlier, the issue involved in tense in the cinema are expressed most easily
through editing. Assembling several shots allows temporal relations that are
exclusive in the single unedited shot. Tense in film involves the temporal marking
of shots in relation to each other. This is not restricted to such situations as
flashback of elipses between shots. Even the creation of a continuity of time over
two shots involves temporal marking because continuity of time in an edited
sequence is a synthetic product not at all identical to the time in which events
are actually filmed. The temporal marking of the relation between any two shots
forms the basis of tense in film.
Before Griffith, temporal relations between shots were often extremely
ambiguous. During the period of Griffith’s filmmaking at Biograph this temporal
ambiguity nearly disappeared, and the rules of temporal continuity over the
shots were established. Griffith’s parallel editing also marked temporal and
spatial relations quite specifically in contrast to the ambiguous temporality of
earlier cinema. The narrator system, therefore, establishes temporal marking
unambiguously, conveying continuity and simultaneity within a variety of spatial
relations”16.
We can clearly locate the discussion of The Sealed Room in this theoretical
framework, as here also the idea of cinematic ‘tense’ manifested throughout the second
movement. Griffith employed a precise sense of cinematic time between two spaces where
editing clearly established the time of action unambiguously. The idea of narrator system

15
Tom Gunning, D.W.Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film (University of Illinois Press 1994) p.
27
16
Ibid. p. 26
also helps us here to identify the underlying narrator which ‘also marked temporal and
spatial relations quite specifically’17.
However, to move further we need to specify the idea of crosscutting and parallel
editing unambiguously to analyse the second film of my choice. The idea of showing two
separate actions together urged filmmakers to device this technique. Griffith, as he made
many films consisting of the last minute rescue, was a master to use this in dramatic
purposes. He was not the inventor of this technique, but can be said as a key figure in its
development18. Going through the various forms of alterations existing before and through
the time of Griffith, we need to specify the specific marker of crosscutting in order to
understand its specific purpose. As discussed earlier, most of the filmmakers of the Early
Cinema didn’t need to change shots before the sequence changed, therefore, no back and
forth , no alterations were necessary within a single sequence. Griffith’s use made this
technique important through his cinematic practice, as we see that only ten films available
today prior to Griffith employed crosscutting19. As oppose to that, during the first eleventh
months of Griffith’s work as director, eighteen films are found where this technique was
necessary to tell the story20.
So, we need to define, first alteration, then crosscutting. Andre Gaudreault and
Philippe Gauthier clearly states that ‘alteration is a discursive configuration that occurs when
each term in two series recurs (A-B-A-B). Thus, one cannot speak of alteration in cases where
only one of the terms is repeated (A-B-A)’21. However, not all alterations are crosscuttings.
Only those alterations which are connected through the simultaneous time can be called
crosscutting. David Bordwell clearly translated the terms from French - montage alterne for
crosscutting and montage parallele for parallel editing. ‘If temporal simultaneity is not
pertinent to the series, the cutting may be called parallel editing; if the series are to be taken
as temporally simultaneous then we have crosscutting’22.
Tom Gunning, however, used the term parallel editing quite loosely to mean both
parallel editing and crosscutting. In his essay, he borrowed three types of editing pattern
from Noel Burch and used the term parallel editing to mean the ‘sequences of shots which
alternate from once location, or group of characters, to another, with the indication that the
actions are occurring at the same time’23. He classified parallel editing as a subclass of alterity
(i.e. the movement from one location to an entirely different one24). In the next sentence he
wrote, ‘Closely related to this strict definition of parallel editing – and in Griffith’s Biograph
films at points difficult to separate from it – are alternating patterns of shots which do not

17
Ibid.
18
Andre Gaudreault and Philippe Gauthier, D.W.Griffith and the Emergence of Crosscutting in A Companion
to D.W.Griffith ed. Charlie Keil (Wiley Blackwell 2018) p. 108
19
Ibid. p. 125
20
Ibid. p. 126
21
Ibid. p. 109
22
Ibid. p. 133 (Note no. 8)
23
Tom Gunning, Weaving a Narrative, Style and Economic Background in Griffith’s Biograph Films in Early
Cinema, Space, Frame, Narrative ed. Thomas Elsaesser with Adam Barker. (British Film Institute 1997) p. 341
24
Ibid. p. 340.
necessarily happen simultaneously’25. However, he didn’t name anything to indicate the
editing pattern which is not parallel editing, but is close to it. (i.e. happening not
simultaneous time, according to Gunning).
Following these two theoretical argument side by side, one can notice a clear
theoretical difference at work. What Gaudreault and Gauthier (and Bordwell) means by
crosscutting (editing in simultaneous time), Gunning calls it parallel editing. Where
Gaudreault and Gauthier used the term parallel editing, they meant editing which are not
simultaneous in time.
I, for the time being, choose to adopt the theoretical principles defined by
Gaudreault and Gauthier for mainly two reasons. Gaudreault and Gauthier defined the
whole system more systematically, using subtle terms to incorporate spatial alterations with
time26. They defined different spatial articulations between two shots as well as their
connected time, where Gunning’s schema is not as useful and as clear as Gaudreault and
Gauthier’s. And more of that, Gaudreault and Gauthier’s essay was written much later and
recent than Gunning’s, which can be read as more theoretically precise definitions.
Therefore, from further on, I shall use the term crosscutting to define editing which ‘weaves
together (shots that) must appear to be unfolding simultaneously in the diegetic universe
suggested by the film’27.

The second film of my choice is The Avenging Conscience (1914) which was made just
after Griffith left the Biograph Company. This film is hugely underrated; scholars and critics
gave their attention much later as oppose to other celebrated Griffith’s feature films.
However, the tightly structured story happening mostly in the mind of its protagonist is one
of the first few examples of early dream film as noted by Vlada Petric28. Apart from that, this
film relies hugely to the idea of crosscutting and sometimes the specific purpose of using
this technique was not as clear as the previous instances. In many cases, shots are joined
together by crosscutting ambiguously, they didn’t generate rational meanings in terms of
cinematic language also.
The Avenging Conscience is the story of a young boy who apparently killed his uncle
who was clearly making obstacles in the course of his love affair. He put the body of the
uncle in the fireplace and sealed it by making brick wall. (Thus, there exists a thematic
connection with The Sealed Room) After the killing he was being haunted by his uncle’s
ghosts which leads him to watch a series of abstract visions allegedly happened in the
heaven and hell. At last, by a big plot twist it is revealed that the whole business of murder
was a dream and the uncle at last accepted their affair and they live happily thereafter.

25
Ibid p. 341
26
Andre Gaudreault and Philippe Gauthier, D.W.Griffith and the Emergence of Crosscutting in A Companion
to D.W.Griffith ed. Charlie Keil (Wiley Blackwell 2018) p. 110-111.
27
Ibid. p. 109
28
Petrić, Vlada. "Griffith's "The Avenging Conscience": An Early Dream Film." Film Criticism 6, no. 2 (1982): 5-
27. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44018695.
 I am limiting myself to the discussions of specific sequences, where, I want to argue
that the employment of alterations are done to generate artistic abstractions. Unlike shot
alterations in the typical last minute rescue films of Griffith, where the shots are altered
between the threatened (usually) girl, threatening goons and the rescuing male figure,
alterations in The Avenging Conscience didn’t actually fulfil the same unambiguous narrative
markers. Also, the narrator system here at work didn’t always used its ‘temporal marking
unambiguously, conveying continuity and simultaneity within a variety of spatial relations’.29
Rather, joining two shots apparently far removed from time and space created abstract
(sometimes eerie) dimensions which are perfectly at par with the mysterious atmosphere of
the story.
Here, the first sequence of our discussion comes with the infertile ‘The Plan of a
Fevered Brain’ at 33 minutes of the film. Just before this section, we’ve already watched the
boy inspired by the symbolic killing of the fly by the spider. He entered his room where his
uncle is at work and informed him about the moneylender who was supposed to return the
money. (Fig. 2)

Fig. 2
In the next two shots, we see the letter and going out of the uncle respectively. Then
suddenly a mysterious shot (Fig. 4) appears which is not spatially and temporally connected
with this sequence.

Fig. 3 Fig. 4 Fig. 5

29
Tom Gunning, D.W.Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film (University of Illinois Press 1994) p.
27
 I’ve put three successive shots together two underline the fact of its apparent
discontinuity. First two shots are joined by a cut (Fig. 3 and Fig. 4), where the latter two (Fig.
4 and Fig. 5) are not actually joined by a dissolve. Rather, the shot with the girl mysteriously
faded in black and then a sharp cut introduced the shot with Uncle. Here, as Vlada Petric
rightly observes30, temporally these three shots cannot be there as the middle shot is
happening in night, as oppose to the other shots in morning. But, as Petric interprets it as ‘a
symbolic image that appears in the protagonist’s mind’31 is not the proven case. There are
no specific textual instances that indicated the protagonist’s mind at work. Besides, an
earlier part of the shot (Fig. 4) is already there in the previous sequence, where it is
connected to the time and space of the specific event (at 31.33 minute). Later in 38.07
minute of the film, this shot appears again in the film which is also there like this sequence
– no specific clue for actual time and space. However, in the later sequence the succession
of stots are –

Fig. 6 Fig. 7 Fig. 8

However, in this case, getting clues from the character’s facial expression, it can be
argued that the image of his sweetheart can come from his mind. Mysterious use of iris in
the close up of the boy’s face also heightened the feeling.
So, as I mentioned, this shot featuring the girl beside the window appears three times
in the narrative, firstly at par with the time and space, secondly with no hint for the insertion,
thirdly, with a subtle hint.
We can’t call this edit ‘alteration’ following the terms of Gaudreault and Gauthier as
here we find the pattern A-B-A, with the second repetition of the ‘B’ event missing. However,
we can see the hand of the underlying narrator here explicitly, showing us things three times
with three different context. However, the narrator system at work here, didn’t deliberately
make the narrative tense unambiguous, rather in two cases, we get the specific hints that
the time of the events didn’t match.
So, this shot acts here (In Fig 4) like two words of a poetry, where the use of the
words cannot be get reduced to their definite lexical meaning. By this time, Griffithian
narrator system has absorbed all the concrete use of the juxtaposition of shots and tried to
create poetic abstraction through this device. Our inability to reduce the successive shots

30
Petrić, Vlada. "Griffith's "The Avenging Conscience": An Early Dream Film." Film Criticism 6, no. 2 (1982): 5-
27. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44018695. P. 10
31
Ibid.
into concrete meanings proved this point further. This shot represents an irrational impulse
sometimes filmmakers felt to transgress the rigid field of rational structure. (However, this
whole film is quite irrational in terms of generating meaning). We can definitely say, with
this shot, Griffith mastered the rational principles of filmmaking and tried to create artistic
and poetic abstraction32.
Apart from the fact that Griffith relied infinitely more on editing than the previous cases of
The Sealed Room, we see in this film frequent use of analytical editing without any indication
of value or morality. (as opposed to The Mothering Heart or The Country Doctor) Almost all
the sequences employed fragmentation of the spaces which, we can assume, was a usual
practice for Griffithian system by 1914. Crosscutting was also a frequent practice. And apart
from this example of the narrative abstraction, we also see the initial crosscutting technique
was developed in mush more sophisticated manner.
Thus, to conclude, our journey from The Sealed Room (1909) to The Avenging Conscience
(1914) marked the phase of transitional cinema where the employment of narrative
techniques clearly shifted from system dominated by misen-en-scene to system dominated
by editing. By 1914, we also see that Griffith employed editing practices which are not always
completely unambiguous compared to the earlier instances. Griffithian narrator system
learned and absorbed through time the use of rational editing techniques and had managed
to use those over rational order. It is no doubt that, as observed by Tom Gunning, Griffith’s
practices are selectively absorbed in Classical Hollywood Cinema, but it also creates more
possibility and potential towards the radical Soviet Filmmakers who also cited Griffith
frequently to theorize their practice of montage.

(Some texts are hyperlinked at exact time to the useful YouTube link of the film The Avenging
Conscience)

32
Tom Gunning also associated possibilities of Griffitian editing towards Eisenstein’s montage. He concluded
his essay ‘Weaving a Narrative’ with these lines – ‘But it is clear that Griffith’s development of parallel editing
during the biograph years opens a tradition that not only moves towards the invisible editing of the classical
Hollywood narrative, but also to (as he was the first to admit) the radical understanding of montage in the
films of Sergei Eisenstein’. Tom Gunning, Weaving a Narrative, Style and Economic Background in Griffith’s
Biograph Films in Early Cinema, Space, Frame, Narrative ed. Thomas Elsaesser with Adam Barker. (British
Film Institute 1997) p. 346