Literary Elements of a movie of your choice Essay

Literary Elements of a movie of your choice - Essay Example so included, albeit with blatantly racist overtones, a historical narrative that explored the racial tensions that occurred during the pre and the post-Civil War period in American history. Through an examination of these elements, this essay explores the literary qualities in D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. While Birth of a Nation is undoubtedly a landmark and influential work of art my personal response to it is less than one of great admiration or enjoyment. It’s clear that its depiction of the blacks during the Reconstruction period as terrorizing the South and preying on the Cameron girl is a highly biased interpretation of events. I believe that the film’s overarching intention is entertainment, but I also recognize that there is a strong racist subtext that characterizes the narrative and makes the film’s true meaning one of glorifying racism and the Ku Klux Klan. Indeed, the necessity of the Klan during the Reconstruction period comes to represent the film’s central moral and theme. I ultimately appreciated the film for its significance to the evolution of film, but was only moved by the film negatively in response to its racist themes. At the time of the film’s release filmmakers weren’t certain that audiences would be able to grasp the complexity of the storyline if it were muddied by techniques that disrupted the linearity of the narrative (Everson 1978). This editing style had long been a literary technique and was a mainstay in novels; its implementation in Birth of a Nation gave the film a literary quality that led critics to proclaim it a masterpiece. In Birth of a Nation, D.W. Griffith uses parallel editing, or intercutting, to great effect during the climatic encounter between the Ku Klux Klan and Silas Lynch. After Gus is depicted as causing Flora to fall off a cliff, because of her fear of his advances, the Klan decide to take measures into their own hands and set out to seek revenge. They find Gus and murder him and then leave