harmonious fusion of indigenous people and their
natural environment: fish glide past the camera; a
smiling Pocahontas runs her hand across the shim-
mering surface; Algonquin natives swim hand in
hand; Pocahontas glides upward trailing a stream
of air bubbles. The accumulative effect of this
AAAAAA pattern is quietly powerful—it repeat-
edly reinforces a feeling of slow-motion tranquility.
But the sequence’s most expressive moment comes
just when this pleasant pattern is broken. The
seventh shot rises from the blue waters to cine -
matically signal the Virginia Company’s intrusion
into the Algonquin paradise. The underwater A
shots were infused with blue; this open-air B shot is
dominated by shades of brown. The opening A
sequence featured close-framed human subjects;
this pattern-breaking B shot is a wide angle of
three large European ships. Everything has sud-
denly changed: the light, the framing, the content,
the world.
The preceding examples offer a taste of how
important patterns can be to our experience and
interpretation of movies. Narrative patterns pro-
vide an element of structure, ground us in thePATTERNS 43(^12)
3 4
Parallel editing in Way Down East Pioneering director
D. W. Griffith risked the lives of actors Lillian Gish and
Richard Barthelmess to film Way down East’s now classic “ice
break” scene——a scene that builds suspense by exposing us
to a pattern of different shots called parallel editing. Griffith
shot much of the blizzard and ice-floe footage along the
Connecticut River, then edited it together with studio shots
and scenes of Niagara Falls. Gish, thinly dressed, was freezing
on the ice and was periodically revived with hot tea.
Although the dangers during filming were real enough, the
“reality” portrayed in the final scene——a rescue from the
certain death that would result from a plunge over Niagara
Falls——is wholly the result of Griffith’s use of a pattern of
editing that has by now become a standard technique in
narrative filmmaking.