with Brady's photographs, Lincoln's speeches, Whitman's war poem. For all its imperfections and absurdities it is equal, in fact, to the best work that has been done in this country" (314).
Some of the inventive images Agee was referring to include Sherman's march to the sea, Lincoln's assassination, the intercutting of old people at home in prayer with trenches piled high with frozen corpses, the devastation of war on the land and on people. Griffith "shapes abstract themes to express an idea, 'War is terrible.'" (MacDonald 70). An example of this is a poignant single shot that symbolizes how terrible war is. The screen is dark except for the lower left hand corner which shows a woman and her three young children huddled next to the ruins of a hilltop home. Then, a slow pan to the right reveals a column of troops stretching off into the distance with burning and pillage taking place in the village below. The shot ends with a pan back from the troops to the mother and children. What Griffith has shown is General Sherman's famous march to the sea, but contrasting individual human anguish with the large scale battle, the effect of war on an innocent family (Ellis 36).
Griffith was able to give "voice" to his silent film by his creative and imaginative sense of cinematic arrangement, of making the silent picture "talk" by "seeing". His use of the visual image is one of his greatest contributions to the art of cinema.
"The most beautiful single shot I have seen in any movie is the battle charge in 'Birth of a Nation,'" Agee said (313). Griffith, with his associate and cameraman Billy Bitzer, placed the camera on the first "space" dolly, taking it everywhere. They devised new and startling visuals -- battle scenes in extreme long shots, action seen in extreme close-ups, photographing the rise of the Klan with a camera fixed on the back of a moving truck (Barry 21). The camera was used as never before, and the vitality is sti...