Find 3 instances in Birth of a Nation where Griffith employs the use of offscreen space. Describe the scene (give time code) and what you see in the frame (in detail). What is being implied with the offscreen space?
Think of 2 instances in other films (any films) where offscreen space is employed by a filmmaker. Tell me the name of the film, as well as what scene you chose. If you have a link, please include it. Describe what is seen on screen and what is being implied offscreen.
Here is a link to Birth of a Nation.
Olivia Tracey
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At 25:35, offscreen space is being employed during the meeting of the proclamation when the men come in and out of the room as they discuss the policies of the document. What this implies is the fluster around the idea of freeing slaves and almost the idea of it being rushed and forced. Another instance of offscreen space is the war scene at 43:36. In this scene they are acting out the civil war and the characters within the scene die from men running outside the frame in. This implies how they don’t know the magnitude of what they're fighting for and the external threat was not entirely evaluated. The last instance is at 1:06:45 during the wounded soldier scene. You can see the all of the widows wailing in the background as the woman comforts the man that loves her. This all implies the idea of grief and what war does to everyone. It highlights the extent of death in the war with the people going in and out of the infirmary and frame all in the background.
A movie that employs offscreen space well is Repulsion. In the scene where she is walking downtown, you can see all the external forces bothering her based on her pace. You may not see these people but it is implied that her surroundings are causing her mental state to deteriorate. One scene that really stuck out was as she was walking the camera focuses on a man antagonizing her but you can no longer see her on frame, highlighting the impact of her distaste towards men. Another spectacular use of space was in The Descent. When the women first enter the cave and you get a fistlook at the vastness you can see the threat within the frame, however the women don't notice. The camera pans away from the corner with the idea of the threat still being there and only the audience knows increasing the suspense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ztyr7l-q144 -repulsion
Dominique T.
ReplyDeleteIn “Birth Of A Nation”, offscreen space is utilised in multiple scenes throughout the duration of the film. At [10:55], there is a shot in which a group of people enter a building, which is filmed inside of a few minutes afterwards. Later, there is a scene where the family visits a plantation, and while the slaves sing and dance, the actors frequently walk from behind the crowd to a spot offscreen [15:50], suggesting that the scene isn’t contained to what the audience is shown within the frame. A third instance occurs around 40 minutes into the film. When the town is raided, there is a shot of the soldiers running towards the general direction of the camera. As soldiers run offscreen at the bottom of the frame, more soldiers run into frame from a cloud of smoke near the top [41:30].
An example of a film of D.W Griffith’s that utilises offscreen space as well is “A Corner In Wheat”. Over the duration of the movie, there are multiple scenes where parallel editing is used rather than solely in a successive manner. The use of this technique implied that certain actions happened simultaneously, despite being in separate locations that were presumably a fair distance from each other.
In The Birth of A Nation, Griffith uses offscreen space to further establish the scenes and make them more seamless. The characters exit the screen to the right in one shot, and enter from the left in the next. This was classic Hollywood movie magic, as the director chose to preserve the film’s continuity by “cutting on action”, or at least some early version of it. At 00:39:20, there is an example of this happening. The group of southern women are trapped in the house during the invasion of the Northern soldiers. Each shot, they run to another room and hide themselves behind the door. Griffith uses the offscreen space (behind the doors shown previously) to create suspense as the soldiers burst through each door, and to keep the film’s continuity. At 00:25:31, when Lincoln is signing the papers in his office, the men that have crowded around his desk exit the screen in the shadows of the background. As the scene grows darker, Lincoln is enclosed in a vignette. This shows the gravity of Lincoln’s choice to declare war on the South as he sits in a praying-like position. The slow exit of the old men to the back of the scene allows the viewer to focus on Lincoln as it reflects his attitude. At 00:48:50, the Confederate army exits the screen. There is a cut to the army entering from the background. The offscreen space is taken up and nothing is left to the imagination as there is some sort of split-screen effect that shows the burning buildings of the town at the top of the screen. This was clearly intentional and not part of the original shot as the two films have been overlapped. In the next shot, the offscreen space is taken up by a set of burning buildings to make up the background. Though this does not help achieve verisimilitude, it does help the viewer interpret this as a larger than life event. Anywhere the viewer looks, there is fire and in the negative space there is red smoke.
ReplyDeleteThough I could not think of any examples off the top of my head, I found an example of this online. In American Beauty, when Ricky was filming Jane, that scene uses offscreen space. The
inconsistent and wobbly camera movement as well as the sound and grain of an old video camera add to the viewer’s interpretation of Jane being on film. This is a common occurrence in movies.
https://videopress.com/v/uUPn8p8g
Three instances in Birth of a Nation where off screen space is used artistically are as follows.At 1:20:22 the protagonist reacquainted with his young lady companion , he and her appear torn exhausted and unkempt.As they approach the door the hand of the man's mother comes out from the left of the screen through a door frame in sideview to embrace her son.This signifies that the world the protagonist was at the beginning of the movie , one of home comforts , comes out of obscurity and invites him back to somewhere where he was removed.At 1:37:40 The politician from the previous scene lies on exhaustion on a couch under a blanket.From the left of the frame a young girl carrying flowers comes into the frame.her juxtaposition to the man in the chair draws attention to his despair and to her naivety in relation to the politician.At 2:24:41 The protagonist paces in a room with his two old and sick parents , he steals a pillow from under his mother's head and leaves through a door frame in the right of the shot as the young girl in the room stares desperately towards the offscreen space where the man exits.This shot depicting her alone staring lasts noticeably long eventually fading out.This scene draws attention to the loneliness and fading of the home our conflicted protagonist leaves.In the beginning of Cleopatra (1963) Julius caesar has a meeting in cleopatra's palace which he does not intend her to hear.She eavesdrops into the meeting through the eyes of a statue in the background accessible through a secret passage.when the shot shows her in the frame she is looking towards the meeting which is occuring , in the shots featuring her,off screen to the right of the frame.The scenes parallel edited with those i just mentioned show the meeting with the statue in the backround.In this situation two separate spaces are connected through eye direction towards off screen space.In the film "Rosemary's Baby"The protagonist is often depicted in a frame of her simply lying in bed.In these scenes the meaning is created from offscreen space where she hears the conspiratorial rituals of her apartment neighbors from behind the walls.This lets the viewer know that Rosemary is aware of the rituals but thinks she is safe.
ReplyDeletehttps://vimeo.com/189363217 (Rosemary's Baby)
ReplyDeletehttps://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000JJH7VM/ref=atv_feed_catalog (Cleopatra 1963)
Griffith employs the use of offscreen space in Birth of a Nation at 7:57 by depicting the two little girls playing and running off screen. The frame stays focused on the other two people positioned in the frame, until a man walks into frame from offscreen. As he moves to the left of the frame to follow the little girl, the frame moves with him slightly to reveal the space to the left of the frame. The use of offscreen space in this scene implies that there is additional space and action taking place that is not pictured in the frame. It causes the audience to be aware that there is something not shown in the frame but still holds significance.
ReplyDeleteAt 40:30, offscreen space is used to suggest motion from screen right to screen left as the Confederate army runs into the offscreen space. It implies that the army is coming from a specific place, and that they are running to a different specific place. When the scene cuts to the room the other Confederate soldiers are raiding, the offscreen space in the previous scene is assumed to be the path leading to the house. The offscreen space in this scene is utilized by Griffith as a liminal quality in the film.
At 1:37:44, the frame depicts the man with Stoneman looking offscreen towards the left. The use of offscreen space implies that there is an object or character to the left of the screen that the man is focused on. There is a cut to Stoneman’s daughter fixing a bouquet of flowers, confirming that the the offscreen area the man was looking towards did depict another character. This also suggests that the man’s focus was entirely on Stoneman’s daughter as the audience’s eyes were drew to his eyeline, which in turn was trained on her.
Offscreen space is employed in Poltergeist (1982) to emphasize a fear of the unknown and to make the viewer aware of what they can’t see. At 00:07, Carol Anne’s arm reaches up from offscreen, scaring her mother and alerting the audience that the offscreen space holds potential danger and fear. At 00:30, Diane pushes in the chairs, then moves to the right while the frame follows her, leaving the chairs in the offscreen space. As she turns back, the chairs and table come back into the frame, and Diane sees them stacked on top of the table. The use of offscreen space in this scene causes both Diane and the audience to develop a fear of the unknown, which creates a feeling of suspense and anxiety when the frame moves to follow a character. When the offscreen space in a scene grows larger, the amount of unknown area also grows, emphasizing the growing sense of fear.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aHWlDIouQU
In The Birth of a nation, D.W. Griffith utilizes off screen space numerous times throughout the film. One instance would be at 38:11 just after the girls walk outside people appear from off screen and start to wreak havoc supposedly, and we see people start to run off the screen and into houses for shelter, the use of off screen space helps us to know that the space onscreen has become a hostile environment and is no longer safe. Another instance can be found at 10:31 when their two friends come to visit, first it shows the main characters looking at the men off screen excitedly and next it shows the men entering the screen and greeting them, in this instance off screen space was used to develop the narrative, reveal how the characters feel about the other characters, and show us that as the men enter the frame they are thus entering the territory of those onscreen. Lastly off screen space is used at 19:00-20:00 when the man who was in the frame previously walks out the door, this part was a bit hard to follow but even so through the utilization of off screen space it was conveyed how the maid seemingly felt about the man who has just left as she spits out the door and throws a sort of temper tantrum when he exits the room. We can tell through the use of off screen space that she is apparently very frustrated with him, and his departure. A movie that I thought of that I watched recently is a movie called As Above So Below, which just came out recently on Netflix, it wasn’t amazing but there was an instance where the camera man must be coached through a situation, on screen we can only see him desperately trying to move through a pile of bones that are crushing him, off screen we can hear the voices of the other characters and the singing of the girls seen earlier in the film. Because of the use of offs screen space you get a feeling of anxiety, the voices of the girls singing are getting louder, and it feels like the others characters are coaching you out of the tight spot.
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