Griffith, Boorman, and Parallel Editing

D. W. Griffith, John Boorman, and Parallel Editing

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John Boorman began his career as an apprentice editor, initially on BBC documentaries, and his later features reflect an unusually intense focus on the creative possibilities of manipulating space and time through creative cutting. In 1964 and 1965, he had the opportunity to closely study the films of D. W. Griffith while making a documentary about his career, and Griffith remains the critical model for Boorman’s experiments with parallel editing.
Many aspects of Griffith’s visual repertoire remain anachronistically tied to nineteenth century practices, and it has long been a commonplace to refer to his narrative debt to the Dickensian novel, especially since the publication of Sergei Eisenstein’s essay “Griffith, Dickens, and the Film Today” in 1944.
Griffith encouraged this when he suggested that his most celebrated innovation, the “switch-back,” was inspired by Dickens’ technique of “switching off:” “He introduces a multitude of characters and incidents, and breaks off abruptly tog o from one to another, but at the end he cleverly gathers all the apparently loose-threads together again, and rounds off the whole" (D.W. Griffith, “Griffith to Film History of World in Gigantic Serial," New York Globe, May 2, 1922, 12).

The Country Doctor (D. W. Griffith, 1909)

D. W. Griffith's Cross-Cutting

As early as 1909, Griffith was experimenting with cross-cutting both to enhance narrative tension and investment and to introduce moral commentary.

John Boorman on Griffith (See Chapter 1)

A Corner in Wheat (D. W. Griffith, 1909)

Intolerance (D. W. Griffith, 1916)

Intolerance

By the middle of the 1910s, Griffith’s conceptions became grander and more utopian, and he claimed at one point that, with cinema, “We have found a universal language, a power that can make men brothers and end war forever.”[i] In his most ambitious film, Intolerance (1916), Griffith intercut four different time periods (ancient Babylon, the Passion of Christ, the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, and 1910s America) as if they were like “four currents, [flowing] side by side.”[ii]
Wherever possible, Griffith attempted to link different sections through associations of movement, gesture, or spatial arrangement. Although the final film possesses a polyphonic shape that holds up to sustained analysis, Griffith’s method was improvisational and the editing was largely intuitive, with some of it done in-camera during shooting.

[i] Lillian Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me (New York: Prentice Hal, 1969), 183
[ii] Clune’s Auditorium Souvenir Booklet for Intolerance

M (Fritz Lang, 1931)

Griffith's Legacies

Boorman’s abiding fascination with Griffith’s editing patterns was shared by filmmakers as distinct as F. W. Murnau, Sergei Eisenstein, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Fritz Lang, Lynne Ramsay, and Christopher Nolan.
In this section of M, Lang builds upon Griffith's use of cross-cutting to generate narrative suspense by incorporating recurring sound motifs and linking them to offscreen space.

Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan, 2017)

Dunkirk

In Dunkirk (2017), Christopher Nolan cubistically cross-cuts three different interlocking time frames depicting the same epochal event.
As with Griffith's Intolerance, this is made comprehensible for viewers through elegant matches on action within and between the different sections (as in the cut from the stretcher being carried in France to young boys in England preparing rescue vessels).

Abraham Lincoln (D. W. Griffith, 1930)

The Civil War in Three Minutes

Although Griffith’s cosmic ambitions diminished after the commercial failure of Intolerance, he continued to refine his approach and to incorporate new technologies. In his first sound film Abraham Lincoln (1930), the possibilities of sound and emblematic music were combined with graphic contrasts to produce a concise, eloquent, and moving distillation of the Civil War in 9 shots.
First, Union troops are seen marching from screen right to screen left accompanied by the Battle Hymn of the Republic (matching high-angle views, A-B-C-A) and this is counterbalanced by a series of shots showing Confederate troops marching in the opposite direction accompanied by Dixie (following an equally rigorous musical A-B-C-B-A pattern, with the switch in the center marked by a shot of one of the soldiers embracing a cheering woman on the side).

Excalibur (John Boorman, 1981)

Matching Movements

In this part of Excalibur (1981), Boorman pursued a similar approach, precisely matching tracking shots with Arthur following Merlin right to left at the beginning and the movement reversed at the end of the sequence.
This archetypal journey into the forest follows the pulling of the mythic Excalibur from the stone and immediately precedes Arthur's assertion of leadership (signaled by the first appearance of the "Wheel of Fortune" from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, 193 5).

Point Blank (John Boorman, 1967)

Psychological Journeys

Boorman also adapted Griffith's editing patterns to suggest more psychological quests into the thickets of troubled memory, as in this montage sequence from Point Blank (1967).