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31 The theatre viewed from the back of the auditorium. As in 20. The mask 4 spreads to reveal the whole theatre.
32 C.S. The bodyguard, enjoying the play. As in 19, within circular mask. I£
33 F.S. Booth. He comes through the door at the end of the passage out 14 side Lincoln's box. He stoops to look through the key-hole into Lincoln's box. He pulls out a revolver and braces himself for the deed.
34 C.S. The revolver. 3
35 33 continued. Booth comes up to the door, has momentary difficulty in 8 opening it, then steps into Lincoln's box.
36 Close view of Lincoln's box. As in 25. Booth appears behind Lincoln. 5
37 The stage. As in 14. The actors are performing. 4
38 As in 36. Booth shoots Lincoln in the back. Lincoln collapses. Booth 5 climbs on to the side of the box and jumps over on to the stage.
39 LS. Booth on the stage. He throws his arms up and shouts.
TITLE : Sic Semper Tyrannis
The plot of this passage is relatively simple : President Lincoln is assassinated at a theatre while his bodyguard has carelessly left his post. In Porter's time, the events might have been rendered in half a dozen shots and been clear to an audience. Griffith, however, is concerned with more than simply reproducing the plot. He has constructed his scene around four groups of characters : Lincoln's party, including the bodyguard ; Elsie Stoneman and Ben Cameron ; Booth, the assassin ; and the actors on the stage. Each time he cuts from one to another, the transition is acceptable because it has been established that all the characters are present at the scene. Thus although the main action (which concerns Lincoln, the bodyguard and Booth only) is repeatedly interrupted to reveal the surrounding events, there is no apparent discontinuity : Porter's continuity principle is in no way violated.
There is, however, a marked difference between Porter's and Griffith's reasons for splitting the action into short fragments. When Porter cut from one image to another, it was usually because, for physical reasons, it had become impossible to accommodate the events he wanted to show in a single shot. In Griffith's continuity, the action is only rarely carried over from one shot to the next. The viewpoint is changed not for physical but for dramatic reasons — to show the spectator a fresh detail of the larger scene which has become most relevant to the drama at the particular moment.
Griffith's approach to editing is thus radically different from Porter's. The excerpt from The Birth of a Nation creates its effects through the cumulative impression of a series of details. Griffith has divided the whole action into a number of components and has then re-created the scene from them. The advantage over the earlier editing method is twofold. Firstly, it enables the director to
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