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dangermousieThe movie recommendation of the day is Broken Blossoms, D.W. Griffith’s best film, and one of the best silent films ever made.
D.W. Griffith is remembered best today as an inventor of a wide variety of movie techniques (e.g. the close-up), and, less kindly, as the creator of Birth of a Nation, which while a revolutionary movie in many respects, is also deeply racist and offensive, as it glorifies the Klan.
However, interestingly, Griffith sank his profits from BoaN (and they were enormous) into two movies that seem expressly designed to contradict the racist, intolerant, backward PoV of BoaN. They were Intolerance and Broken Blossoms. Perhaps significantly, neither movie was a big hit (Intolerance flopped with superhuman speed). I think those two are the best Griffith movies I’ve seen. Intolerance, with its loose, episodic structure, deals with (you guessed it), man’s intolerance to man through the ages, on basis of religion, race, nationality (and yes, those temple dancers ARE topless. That was before the Code). Throughout the vignettes there interweaves a story of a young unwed mother whose child is about to be taken from her by the social services people ‘for the good of the child’ because “OMG!slut.”
But the movie that I really fell in love with is Broken Blossoms, a simple, spare, and gorgeous story of *gasp* interracial love. In a way, this tender, tragic love story between a young Chinese man who is shunned by the prejudiced whites and becomes an opium addict out of despair and alienation (played by non-Chinese Richard Barthelmess) and a young white abused daughter of a drunken boxer (played by Lillian Gish), set in the London slums, seems like a rejoinder to all those ridiculous scenes in BoaN where evil Black people try to rape the virginal Southern girls. BB is not a cheery movie. These people suffocate under lack of options, under lack of beauty, lack of love. And yet when RB and LG cross paths, for a few moments they both find respite and peace from the cruelty around them. I adore the scene where she stays at his house and he dresses her up in a traditional Chinese outfit, and for the first time in her life, she feels safe and treasured and it’s amazing to watch what those two can convey with just their eyes. But of course, her father finds out about this and…Like I said, not a happy movie but a brilliant, beautiful and tender one. I don’t know how Griffith could be the person who’d make both Birth of a Nation and Broken Blossoms (not to mention Intolerance). But all I know is, I am glad he made the latter because in many ways they are the best rebuttal to the former there is.
D.W. Griffith is remembered best today as an inventor of a wide variety of movie techniques (e.g. the close-up), and, less kindly, as the creator of Birth of a Nation, which while a revolutionary movie in many respects, is also deeply racist and offensive, as it glorifies the Klan.
However, interestingly, Griffith sank his profits from BoaN (and they were enormous) into two movies that seem expressly designed to contradict the racist, intolerant, backward PoV of BoaN. They were Intolerance and Broken Blossoms. Perhaps significantly, neither movie was a big hit (Intolerance flopped with superhuman speed). I think those two are the best Griffith movies I’ve seen. Intolerance, with its loose, episodic structure, deals with (you guessed it), man’s intolerance to man through the ages, on basis of religion, race, nationality (and yes, those temple dancers ARE topless. That was before the Code). Throughout the vignettes there interweaves a story of a young unwed mother whose child is about to be taken from her by the social services people ‘for the good of the child’ because “OMG!slut.”
But the movie that I really fell in love with is Broken Blossoms, a simple, spare, and gorgeous story of *gasp* interracial love. In a way, this tender, tragic love story between a young Chinese man who is shunned by the prejudiced whites and becomes an opium addict out of despair and alienation (played by non-Chinese Richard Barthelmess) and a young white abused daughter of a drunken boxer (played by Lillian Gish), set in the London slums, seems like a rejoinder to all those ridiculous scenes in BoaN where evil Black people try to rape the virginal Southern girls. BB is not a cheery movie. These people suffocate under lack of options, under lack of beauty, lack of love. And yet when RB and LG cross paths, for a few moments they both find respite and peace from the cruelty around them. I adore the scene where she stays at his house and he dresses her up in a traditional Chinese outfit, and for the first time in her life, she feels safe and treasured and it’s amazing to watch what those two can convey with just their eyes. But of course, her father finds out about this and…Like I said, not a happy movie but a brilliant, beautiful and tender one. I don’t know how Griffith could be the person who’d make both Birth of a Nation and Broken Blossoms (not to mention Intolerance). But all I know is, I am glad he made the latter because in many ways they are the best rebuttal to the former there is.
