Video Essay

The type of video paper I chose to create is PechaKucha. I selected the movie “Intolerance”. By studying the editing techniques used in this film, I attempted to apply similar editing methods to my video essay.

This film uses cross editing to complete the narrative of the entire movie. It combines four stories that are tragedies resulting from conflicts among humans due to their exclusion of those with different viewpoints, and these stories are shot in different time periods. This editing technique stitches together stories from different time periods to achieve a non-linear narrative style, jointly constructing the temporal transitions in the film. This is a montage editing technique.In Film Art: Introduction (Bordwell & Thompson & Smith, 2019), it is mentioned that montage sequences are an artistic technique that creates new narrative effects or expresses specific themes by arranging and combining different shots, images, timelines, sounds, and musical fragments.

The first story recounts how, during the Babylonian Empire, the king introduced new deities, inciting hatred among the traditional priests. Seeking revenge, the priests colluded with the Persian army, ultimately leading to the downfall of Babylonian civilization. The second story tells of Jesus preventing a crowd from stoning an “adulterous woman,” uttering the famous words, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone,” prompting the crowd to reflect. The third story depicts the escalating conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism, culminating in the French queen orchestrating the massacre of Protestants during a festival. The fourth story portrays factory owners cutting workers’ wages to fund a certain association, triggering strikes and bloody clashes. These narratives all revolve around themes of religious persecution, racial hatred, class conflict, and social prejudice—all manifestations of humanity’s tendency to reject those who are different. The film interweaves these tales from different eras through editing, creating a sense of repetition due to overlapping plot elements.

The seamless transitions of shots between different eras and locations inevitably lead to confusion. Therefore, Griffith employed a unified element to connect these four stories and make the narrative more coherent. He linked these stories through a sentence from Whitman’s poetry and the recurring theme of a woman rocking a cradle. “Today as yesterday, endlessly rocking, ever bringing the same human passions, the same joys and sorrows.” This also implies to the audience that these four seemingly unrelated stories, spanning a long period of time, share certain similar characteristics and common elements that bind them together. The image of the woman rocking the cradle recurs throughout the narrative, reminding the audience that the theme of the story is cyclical – humanity constantly repeats the same tragedy.

After comprehending the overall storyline and the intentions behind certain shot edits, I decided to attempt to integrate the repetitive elements in the film, so as to strengthen the theme through the paragraphs connecting these scenes. I selected segments from five stories where humans engaged in battles due to differences in stance, as well as the scene of the rocking cradle.

I adopted the skill used at the beginning of the film, which involved using the element of shaking the cradle to present the subsequent plot. In the following paragraphs, I edited the war scenes from different periods in the film, attempting to highlight the theme that wars are cyclical in nature.

However， unfortunately， this attempt did not succeed. I discovered that in the video essay， the combination of these image segments might have strengthened the war theme， but the frequent switching of war scenes from different eras in the video would make the audience feel confused and unable to maintain the narrative coherence as in a film. After reflection，I believe that I need draw on the editing techniques of the film， select the elements that recur throughout the entire film as the props for story connection， rather than simply repeating the segments to improve.

Reference

Bordwell D., Smith J. and Thompson K. (2019). Film art. New York, New York: McGraw-Hill Education.