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Home , Broken Blossoms, Drums of Love, Hearts of the World, Orphans of the Storm, Richard Barthelmess, Scarlet Days

August 26, 2014 (Series 29: 1) D.W. Griffith, , OR THE YELLOW MAN AND THE GIRL (1919, 90 minutes)

Directed, written and produced by D.W. Griffith Based on a story by Cinematography by G.W. Bitzer Film Editing by James Smith

Lillian Gish ... Lucy - The Girl ... The Yellow Man ... Battling Burrows

D.W. Griffith (director) (b. David Llewelyn Wark Griffith, January 22, 1875 in LaGrange, Kentucky—d. July 23, 1948 (age 73) in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California) won an Honorary Academy Award in 1936. He has 520 director credits, the first of which was a short, , in 1908, and the last of which was The Struggle in 1931. Some of his other films are 1930 Abraham Lincoln, 1929 Lady of the Pavements, 1928 The Battle of the Sexes, 1928 , 1926 The Sorrows of Satan, 1925 That Royle Girl, 1925 Sally of the Sawdust, 1924 Darkened Vales (Short), 1911 The Squaw's Love (Short), 1911 Isn't Life Wonderful, 1924 America, 1923 The White Rose, 1921 Bobby, the Coward (Short), 1911 (Short), 1911 , 1920 , 1920 The Love Enoch Arden: Part II (Short), and 1911 Enoch Arden: Part I Flower, 1920 The Idol Dancer, 1919 , (Short). 1919 , 1919 The Mother and the Law, 1919 The Fall In 1908, his first year as a director, he did 49 films, of Babylon, 1919 Broken Blossoms or The Yellow Man and the some of which were 1908 The Feud and the Turkey (Short), 1908 Girl, 1918 The Greatest Thing in Life, 1918 , A Woman's Way (Short), 1908 (Short), 1908 The 1916 Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages, 1915 Taming of the Shrew (Short), 1908 The Call of the Wild (Short), , 1914 The Escape, 1914 Home, Sweet 1908 Romance of a Jewess (Short), 1908 The Planter's Wife Home, 1914 The Massacre (Short), 1913 The Mistake (Short), (Short), 1908 The Vaquero's Vow (Short), 1908 Ingomar, the and 1912 Grannie. In 1912, he directed 70 shorts, a few of which Barbarian (Short), 1908 The Zulu's Heart, and 1908 The are (Short), The Burglar's Dilemma (Short), My Greaser's Gauntlet. He also has 228 writing credits, often under Hero (Short), Brutality (Short), The Informer (Short), My Baby assumed names: Irene Sinclair, Gaston de Tolignac, Roy (Short), 1912 Heredity (Short), 1912 Sinclair, Captain Victor Marier, and Granville Warwick. Griffith (Short), 1912 In the North Woods (Short), 1912 A Pueblo Legend also has 96 producer credits, including 1930 Abraham Lincoln, (Short), 1912 A Pueblo Romance, 1912 Man's Lust for Gold 1928 The Battle of the Sexes, 1924 America, 1923 The White (Short), 1912 The Female of the Species (Short), 1912 Fate's Rose, 1921 Orphans of the Storm, 1920 Way Down East, 1919 Interception (Short), 1912 The Punishment (Short), and 1912 A The Fall of Babylon, 1916 Intolerance: Love's Struggle Siren of Impulse (Short). In 1911, he directed 75 short films, Throughout the Ages, 1916 The Half-Breed, 1916 Macbeth, and some of which were 1911 The Failure (Short), 1911 A Woman 1915 The Birth of a Nation. Scorned (Short), 1911 The Miser's Heart (Short), 1911 Through

Griffith—BROKEN BLOSSOMS—2

G.W. Bitzer (cinematographer) (b. Johann Gottlob Wilhelm or The Yellow Man and the Girl, 1918 Hearts of the World, 1916 Bitzer, April 21, 1872 in Roxbury, Massachusetts—d. April 29, Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages, 1915 Enoch 1944 (age 72) in Hollywood, California) has 1,255 Arden (Short), 1915 The Birth of a Nation, and 1912 An Unseen cinematographer credits, the last of which was 1933 Hotel Enemy (Short). Variety. Some of the others were 1928 The Battle of the Sexes, 1924 America, 1923 The White Rose, 1921 Orphans of the Richard Barthelmess ... The Yellow Man (b. Richard Semler Storm, 1920 Way Down East, 1919 The Fall of Babylon, 1919 Barthelmess, May 9, 1895 in , New York—d. Broken Blossoms or The Yellow Man and the Girl, 1916 August 17, 1963 (age 68) in Southampton, New York) appeared Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages, and 1915 The in 80 films and TV shows, including 1942 The Mayor of 44th Birth of a Nation. His first film was 1896 William McKinley at Street, 1942 The Spoilers, 1940 The Man Who Talked Too Much, Canton, Ohio (Documentary short). 1939 , 1935 Four Hours to Kill!, 1934 A Modern Hero, 1934 Massacre, 1931 The Last Flight, 1930 The James Smith (editor) (b. Lash, 1930 The Dawn Patrol, James Edward Smith, March 1928 Scarlet Seas, 1928 The 7, 1892 in Staten Island, New Little Shepherd of Kingdom York—d. July 21, 1975 (age Come, 1925 Shore Leave, 1923 83) in Los Angeles, Fury, 1921 Tol'able David, 1920 California) has 75 editing Way Down East, 1919 Scarlet credits, some of which are Days, 1919 Broken Blossoms or 1958 “Tombstone Territory” The Yellow Man and the Girl, (TV Series, 9 episodes), 1958 1917 The Valentine Girl, 1917 “Highway Patrol” (TV Series), The Eternal Sin, 1917 The Moral 1948 The Girl from Code, 1916 Snow White, 1916 Manhattan, 1946 Mr. Ace, Just a Song at Twilight, 1916 1939 Never Say Die, 1938 War Brides, and 1916 Gloria's Ride a Crooked Mile, 1938 Romance. Romance in the Dark, 1937 Bulldog Drummond Comes Donald Crisp ... Battling Back, 1934 Father Brown, Burrows (b. George William Detective, 1930 Abraham Crisp, July 27, 1882 in Bow, Lincoln, 1928 The Battle of the Sexes, 1926 The Sorrows of London, England, UK—d. May 25, 1974 (age 91) in Van Nuys, Satan, 1924 America, 1921 Orphans of the Storm, 1920 Way California) won the 1942 Academy Award for Best Actor in a Down East, 1919 Broken Blossoms or The Yellow Man and the Supporting Role for How Green Was My Valley (1941). He Girl, 1916 Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages, appeared in 170 other films, some of which were 1963 Spencer's 1915 The Birth of a Nation, and 1909 (Short). Mountain, 1959 A Dog of Flanders, 1958 The Last Hurrah, 1955 He was the supervising editor for 3 films—1948 On Our Merry The Man from Laramie, 1955 The Long Gray Line, 1954 Prince Way, 1946 The Diary of a Chambermaid, and 1945 Captain Valiant, 1949 Challenge to , 1945 Son of Lassie, 1944 Kidd—and acted in 2—1921 Orphans of the Storm and 1912 National Velvet, 1944 The Uninvited, 1943 , What Happened to Mary (Short). 1941 How Green Was My Valley, 1941 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1940 Knute Rockne All American, 1940 The Sea Hawk, 1940 Dr. ... Lucy - The Girl (b. Lillian Diana Gish, October Ehrlich's Magic Bullet, 1939 The Private Lives of Elizabeth and 14, 1893 in Springfield, Ohio—d. February 27, 1993 (age 99) in Essex, 1939 Juarez, 1939 Wuthering Heights, 1938 The Dawn New York City, New York) won an Honorary Academy Award, Patrol, 1938 Valley of the Giants, 1938 The Amazing Dr. 1971. She appeared in 121 theatrical and made-for-TV films, the Clitterhouse, 1938 Jezebel, 1937 The Life of Emile Zola, 1937 last of which was 1987 The Whales of August. Some of the others Parnell, 1934 The Crime Doctor, 1932 Red Dust, 1931 Svengali, were 1986 Sweet Liberty, 1981 “The Love Boat” (TV Series), 1929 Trent's Last Case, 1919 Broken Blossoms or The Yellow 1978 A Wedding, 1969 Arsenic and Old Lace (TV Movie), 1967 Man and the Girl, 1916 Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout The Comedians, 1960 The Unforgiven, 1955 The Sound and the the Ages, 1916 Ramona, 1915 The Birth of a Nation, 1914 The Fury, 1955 The Night of the Hunter, 1953 “The Trip to Escape, 1914 The Stiletto (Short), 1914 The Battle of the Sexes, Bountiful” (TV Movie), 1948 Portrait of Jennie, 1946 Duel in 1911 The Squaw's Love (Short), and 1908 The French Maid the Sun, 1942 Commandos Strike at Dawn, 1927 Annie Laurie, (Short). He also has 72 directing credits, the last of which was 1926 The Scarlet Letter, 1926 La bohème, 1925 Ben-Hur: A Tale 1930 The Runaway Bride, and the first, 1914 Her Father's Silent of the Christ, 1924 Romola, 1921 Orphans of the Storm, 1920 Partner (Short). Way Down East, 1919 , 1919 Broken Blossoms Griffith—BROKEN BLOSSOMS—3

Philip Carli. “Philip Carli brings both prodigious musical talent channels. In 1996 his orchestral score to Herbert Brenon’s Peter and a committed scholarly outlook to his lifelong passion for the Pan (1924) received its world premiere under his direction at Le music and culture of the turn of Giornate del Cinema Muto, the last century. He discovered performed by the Flower City at the age of five Society Orchestra of Rochester, and began his accompaniment New York, which Mr. Carli career at thirteen, with a founded in 1993. His score for performance for Lon Chaney’s full orchestra to Mary 1923 version of The Pickford’s Stella Maris was Hunchback of Notre Dame. recorded by the Moravian While at college he Philharmonic orchestra for programmed and accompanied video release by Milestone an annual series of silent films, Films and the Mary Pickford and also organized and Foundation in 1999. The Flower conducted a 50-piece student City Society Orchestra has also orchestra using 19th-century recorded his scores for Captain performance practice. Since Salvation, commissioned by then, he has continued his , and The studies of the film, music and Poor Little Rich Girl, culture of the late nineteenth commissioned by the Pickford and early twentieth centuries, Foundation.” earning a doctorate from the Eastman School of Music. He has at the same time toured extensively as a film accompanist GRIFFITH, D(AVID) W(ARK). From World Film Directors. throughout North America and Europe, performing on keyboard Edited by John Wakeman. The H.W. Wilson Company NY and with orchestra at such venues as Lincoln Center and the 1987. Entry by Gerald Mast Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery in D. W. Griffith, the American director and producer who Washington, DC, the Cinémathèque Québécoise in Montreal, the codified the cinematic means of storytelling, was born on a farm National Film Theatre in London, and the Berlin International in Oldham County, Kentucky, twenty miles from Louisville. He Film Festival. He is the staff accompanist for the George was one of the seven children of Jacob Wark Griffith and the Eastman House in Rochester, New York, and performs annually former Mary Oglesby. His father was a half-trained physician, at several film festivals in the United States as well as at Le gold prospector, farmer, raconteur, orator, politician and soldier. Giornate del Cinema Muto in Italy. He had fought with the United States Army in the Mexican War “In matters of musical style, Dr. Carli’s central dictum for and against it as a lieutenant colonel in the Confederate calvary. film accompaniment is that the score and performance should Throughout his career D.W. Griffith revealed himself serve the film above all, regardless of the particular genre of the very much the product of his Southern childhood. His films music. In an ideal performance, the audience should be caught up always reflected a special fondness for rural life and rural people, in the excitement – or humor, or pathos – of the drama without a longing for an idyllic pastoral world, simpler, clearer, and specific awareness of the accompaniment, even while it is sweeter than the urban present. He cherished the chivalric helping to intensify the film’s emotional message. For his own traditions of the antebellum South, just as his father Jacob accompaniments, he draws on his deep knowledge of “period” cherished the sword that hung by his side as a soldier and over musical materials, including both popular dance forms of the his mantel after the Civil War. Like his father, Griffith identified 1920s and the highly chromatic music developed for nineteenth- human feelings with concrete symbols. He also identified with century opera. The colorful scores, whether they are organ or Southern attitudes toward the proper place of whites and blacks. piano improvisations conceived on stage in tandem with the film But if he was a racist—as we now define that term—he was also or original compositions for full orchestra, help the audience to a populist, sharing the nineteenth-century agrarian suspicion of bridge the cultural gap between their everyday lives and the film big business and meddlesome government. From childhood also images produced and edited generations ago. An exciting score came his initiation into the “finer things” of art. His father, the in an idiom that would be familiar to the original audience for the possessor of a famously powerful and resonant voice, introduced film leads the modern viewer to accept dramatic conventions that him as a small child to Shakespeare, Poe, Dickens, Longfellow, might otherwise seem stilted or even unintentionally comical, and the Bible, and also took him to his first magic-lantern show. rather than highlighting these as more “modern” scores can do. Griffith said that “the one person I really loved most in The musical translation pulls viewers deeply into the world of the all my life was my father.” But ‘Roarin’ Jake, who never entirely film by engaging their emotions in musical terms that are still recovered from his Civil War wounds, and was a heavy drinker, familiar and strongly compelling today. died in 1882, when his adoring son was only seven. In 1890 the “Dr. Carli has accompanied hundreds of films over the Griffith family moved to Louisville. Griffith took what jobs he years on piano and organ, and recorded piano accompaniments to could find, working as an elevator operator in a dry good store, over seventy films for video release by the , a clerk in a book store, reporter for the Louisville Courier- number of film and video companies, and for broadcast on the Journal—until he discovered his metier in the theatre. In 1896 American Movie Classics and the Turner Classic Movies cable Sarah Bernhardt’s company came to Louisville. Griffith got a job Griffith—BROKEN BLOSSOMS—4

as super: “I deified myself by carrying a spear for the divine remarkable years, arguably the most remarkable in the history of Sarah Bernhardt.”. . . the cinema. During this period Griffith personally directed some He became an itinerant actor in American provinces, 420 films, most of them one-reelers (a 35-mm reel, with a playing mostly minor roles with mostly undistinguished stock maximum of 1000 feet of film, ran between ten and fifteen companies, for which he received little notice and little pay. minutes). While the film could not grow in length—the one-reel Unlike his future colleague, Mack Sennett, Griffith never played restriction was imposed by the MPPC to fit the exhibition in New York, while Sennett worked both on Broadway and in the patterns of the nickelodeons—they grew steadily in narrative premier burlesque theatres of the Bowery. Griffith’s theatrical complexity, thematic subtlety, psychological integrity, and apprenticeship was both more genteel and more shabby. What he stylistic fluidity. In these four years, movies evolved from crude, was learning, without knowing it, were the techniques of clumsy skeletons of theatrical and novelistic fictions to theatrical melodrama—the sure-fire plot turns and emotional tugs evocative, autonomous, cinematic versions of the same kind of that survived even mediocre playing and sloppy production. Both narratives. The person most responsible for that evolution was Griffith’s strengths and his excesses could be traced to his clear Griffith. As Edward Wagenknecht noted, “Even we children understanding of what would play in Peoria at the turn of the sensed that Biograph pictures were different, although we could century. not tell wherein their differences might consist.” While he waited for rehearsals of his play, The Fool and Although Griffith’s accomplishment in this period is the Girl, to begin, Griffith and his wife found work together on indisputable, critics and historians as well as children have had the stage—in a production of difficulty in describing it. The The One Woman by Thomas idea that recurs most often is Dixon, author of The Clansman, that Griffith personally on which Griffith was to base invented uniquely cinematic his most famous film. The techniques. Robert M. production quietly folded on the Henderson summarized road. Griffith immediately Griffith’s accomplishment at began work on his next play, Biograph by compiling a list of War, an epic of the American twenty-four techniques that Revolution in which an Griffith was supposed to have indentured servant becomes a contributed to the cinema. heroic spy serving General Lewis Jacobs wrote that “he George Washington and the repudiated theatrical American cause. As in so many conventions and evolved a later Griffith films, the historical epic served as background for a method of expression peculiar to the screen.” Underlying such romantic drama of the common people…. assertions are two assumptions that dominated film history for After outgrowing the vaudeville houses, where films five decades. were merely one more item on the vaudeville bill, they began Both Griffith and the movies were born in that era of moving into their own theatres in 1902. By 1908 it was estimated American invention symbolized by Thomas Alva Edison and that weekly attendance had reached one hundred million at Alexander Graham Bell. The creation of a new and efficient American nickelodeons—little storefront theatres, seating about machine or process seemed the highest human attainment. two hundred, where it cost a nickel or dime to see a sixty-minute Invention and progress were synonymous; the patent and the program of short films. Those most possessed by “nickel copyright were instruments of destiny. To credit Griffith with the madness” returned daily, if not twice a day, for different invention of devices first strikingly used in his Biograph films— screenings. Stage actors, who grudgingly participated in what close-ups, distant panoramas, cross-cuts—was to elevate his had seemed like a passing fad, found themselves involved in a accomplishment into that American pantheon where art, science, vigorous young art form. It was no coincidence that D.W. and commerce met under the influence of historical inevitability. Griffith and Mack Sennett both worked in films for the first time Griffith contributed to his own apotheosis when he laid claim to in 1907…. the invention of techniques and, late in life, regretted not having By 1908 Griffith was at Biograph—the American patented them. Later film historians, attacking this myth, actually Mutoscope and , as it was formally known, at succumbed to it when they demonstrated that Griffith only 11 East 14th Street. It was founded in 1896 by a syndicate of appropriated the techniques he claimed as his own. In proving inventors and investors...In 1908 it became an important member that Griffith was no inventor, historians overlooked the problem of the Motion Picture Patents Company. Set up to block the of whether stylistic devices should properly be considered encroachment of independent producers into the industry. inventions at all. Biograph films had not captured the audience imagination as The second assumption also arose from nineteenth- fully as Porter’s at Edison. Even with a superb cameraman, G.W. century certainties. Each art was supposed to have a unique (“Billy”) Bitzer, Biograph films, generally directed by Wallace mission, calling for unique tools: painting was pictorial, music C. (“Old Man”) McCutcheon, were often plodding or melodic, the theatre verbal, and so forth. A tradition of film incoherent…. theory, stretching from Griffith to Eisenstein, determined that the Griffith directed his first film, The Adventures of Dollie, unique tool of cinema was editing—the joining of disparate times in July 1908, with his wife in the lead. Thus began four and spaces into a single coherent artifact. It was editing or Griffith—BROKEN BLOSSOMS—5

montage that distinguished cinema from theatre. While earlier bourgeois parlor with motifs from the dime novel and penny films were “uncinematic” because they were “theatrical,” dreadful. American films ever after would bounce between these composed of unedited shots spliced together in consecutive two poles or, like Griffith, try to combine them…. order, Griffith’s films from 1908 to 1912 increasingly exploited Griffith’s most productive Biograph year was 1909— the power of editing for both emotional and thematic impact. both in quantity (138 films) and innovative quality. A frantic Kemp N. River’s study of Griffith’s years at Biograph was production schedule made it possible for Griffith to finish as ruthlessly mathematical: the maturity of a film should be many as three or four little films each week....This was the year ascertained by counting the number of shots. Of course, the in which Griffith’s stock company of actors began to take shape. Biograph films reflect Griffith’s growing mastery of many other Mary Pickford, Mack Sennett, Henry B. Walkthall, Robert elements no less essential to communicative cinema: effective Harron, , Miriam Cooper, and James Kirkwood all composition, framing, and lighting; the telling use of both human joined the Griffith company before the end of 1909. personalities and inanimate objects; complex patterns of This was also the year of Griffith’s first use of cross- movement within the frame. cutting to build the suspense of a last- Intent on chronicling a minute rescue. unique cinematic art, historians took Although Griffith melodramas Griffith’s editing as his “repudiation” receive critical attention mostly on of the theatre. Few early account of their editing, two Griffith commentators realized, or mood pieces are among his most remembered, that even Griffith’s most interesting films of 1909. In The famous editing device—the cross-cut Drunkard’s Reformation Griffith depicts during the last-minute rescue—came a husband whose heavy drinking brings directly from the nineteenth-century grief to his wife and daughter. The stage, Increasingly complex theatrical lighting effect with which the film ends, machinery had made quick changes of the reunited family basking in the warm location—from the victim on the glow of a blazing fireplace has attracted railroad tracks to the hero rushing to most of the critical approbation her rescue—possible and popular. (although Edwin S. Porter had used the Griffith did not so much repudiate the same lighting effect to similar purpose in stage as discover ways to translate its The Seven Ages, five years earlier.) It powerful effects into the terms of a was Griffith’s first film to explore the new medium. curse of drink, which would become The real “discovery” of Griffith’s own curse in his later years. Griffith’s 400-plus Biograph films is The husband’s reformation is inspired by what we think of “the movies” as a a stage play that parallels his own life: a whole. From an inchoate collection of husband whose drinking destroys his familiar plot motifs in 1908 we see the simultaneous emergence family. That Griffith can tell the same story twice within the of genres, character types, expressive interior and exterior decor, same film—one using deep film space and a relatively subtle a lexicon of shots, empathic film acting, and powerful rhythms style of acting, the other using flatter stage space and broadly and resources of movement within the frame and between theatrical acting—reveals Griffith’s awareness of the stylistic frames. When Griffith began making films in 1908 it was as if differences between the theatre that he had left and the movies he practitioners were barely able to construct the filmic equivalent had adopted. of a coherent sentence; by the time he finished with the one- In 1913 Griffith made several key transitions: from reeler in 1913 they were able to write “The Tell-Tale Heart.” short film to long, from staff director to auteur, from the MPPC Even his very first film, The Adventures of Dollie studio Biograph to the independent company Mutual. The film reveals visual care, despite its hackneyed story of a child stolen business itself was in a similar state of change and growth. by gypsies and saved from a plunge over the falls.... Such Spectacular feature films from Europe—Queen Elizabeth, Quo narrative care was rare in 1908 cinema. Vadis?—had become road-show attractions in legitimate Other Griffith films of 1908 foreshadow his future theatres, while movie palaces were rising on Broadway. Like his predilections and preoccupations. His second film, The Redman coming to Biograph in 1908, Griffith’s move in 1913 was both a and the Child, reverses the convention of Dollie by making the cause and an effect of activity in the film business as a whole. In “foreigner,” an American Indian, the heroic rescuer of a a full-page advertisement in the New York Dramatic Mirror of threatened child, assailed by mercenary white attackers. Griffith, September 29, 1913, Griffith proclaimed himself the “producer whose racism did not usually extend to Indians, shared his of all great Biograph successes,” listed 151 of them, and claimed generation’s belief in the uncorrupted virtue of the Noble Savage. the invention of the close-up, the long shot, cross-cutting, and Griffith’s taste for genteel literature also became evident in 1908 “restraint of expression.”…. one-reel versions of The Taming of the Shrew and After Many Griffith films of 1913-14, whether for Biograph or Years, the latter the first of several versions of Tennyson’s Mutual, showed him groping toward longer narrative structures, Enoch Arden. In shaping coherent film narratives, Griffith was grander moral themes and more impressive visual settings. The also elevating popular taste, combining the books of the Battle of Elderbush Gulch, Griffith’s most spectacular Western, Griffith—BROKEN BLOSSOMS—6

included a preliminary sketch for the climax of The Birth of a was Griffith’s new role as visionary prophet more obvious than Nation: settlers trapped inside a cabin battle the encircling in his next film, Intolerance, perhaps the maddest, most Indians, while the cavalry gallops to the eventual rescue. idiosyncratic, most overwhelming and most overblown project in After six frantic years of production, averaging more film history. While shooting The Mother and the Law, about than a film a week, Griffith invested three years in just two films. gangs and crime in the city slums, Griffith got the notion that The Birth of a Nation, filmed over the final six months of 1914 spectacular historical parallels could be found for its simple and released in January 1915, was another blend of film story. The most lavish was set in the ancient civilization of technique and literary aspiration. Frank Woods’ adaptation of Babylon, which Griffith reconstructed on an enormous scale. The Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman (which Dixon himself had earlier other historical settings were the Judea of Christ and the France adapted for the stage), incorporated passages from an even more of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre. The theme of luridly racist Dixon novel, The Leopard’s Spots. The Intolerance—which Griffith subtitles “A Sun Play of the controversial result offered a romanticized view of the Ages”—was that social catastrophes always resulted from antebellum South, the devastating effects of the Civil War, and intolerant bigotry. The fall of Babylon, the death of Christ, the the struggle of white Southerners to survive the Reconstruction. slaughter of the Huguenots, and the dissolution of the modern Two families, the Stonemans of the North and the family could all be traced to the hypocrisy of “Uplifters.” Camerons of the South, are torn apart by the War Between the Although Griffith’s war against intolerance may have been States but reunited at the conclusion in harmony and matrimony, inspired by recent attempts to ban or censor The Birth of a aided by the heroic Ku Klux Klan, in a brilliantly edited last- Nation, the film’s grandiose aspirations were also consistent with minute rescue, the excitement of which is hard his new public persona. He was expected to to resist. The Klan preserves Stonemans and top The Birth of a Nation. And he did. Camerons alike from death and rapine by Intolerance was released in 1916. rampaging black hordes. Despite Griffith’s Though for most critics and many viewers in softening of Dixon’s most shocking passages, the major cities it kept the artistic promise of the film provoked the first massive American The Birth of a Nation, it did not keep its social protest against racist cinematic commercial promise. With costs rumored at $2 propaganda. Both the infant NAACP and its million (but documented at about $400,000), white allies urged censorship of the most Intolerance never repaid its original offensive scenes or sued to prohibit showings investment. Some historians have blamed the altogether. Although social activists learned film’s pacifist stance at a time when the nation much from this early campaign, civic agitation was flexing its muscles for war; others its only helped publicize the film in 1915. confusing metaphorical structure—the The Birth of a Nation cost more than capricious leaps back and forth through any film ever had—over $100,000, which history. cites the lack of an Griffith had to beg and borrow to complete the intense dramatic focus: just as we are project. It also made more, in proportion to its beginning to sympathize with one group of cost, than any film ever would—almost twenty characters, we are transported elsewhere…. times its cost in its initial domestic run. It became the first After investing nearly two years of his creative life in blockbuster in film history—the first film that had to be seen, Intolerance, Griffith returned to an earlier pattern: a diet of even at two-dollar ticket prices in special road-show modest programmers, with one special project each year. His presentations. The reason for its success was not its racist view of fame as a director of battle scenes brought an invitation from the American history but its visual splendor, its care and detail with British government to shoot propaganda footage on actual World historical settings, and its tender depiction of human feelings…. War I battlefields. The documentary location footage he obtained Although the film provoked the anger of antiracists— in this way was woven into three fictional films of 1918—the and still does—it remains an essential document in American major production, Hearts of the World, and two programmers, cultural history. Most white Americans in 1915 shared Griffith’s The Great Love and The Greatest Thing in Life. In each film, as antipathy toward miscegenation and regarded social reformers in The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, history intrudes into the who supported the black cause as meddlesome cranks. The lives and loves of simple families, here torn and tested by the “good” blacks in Griffith’s films were “Uncle Toms,” Great War but with the courage, heart, and moral strength to impersonated by white actors in blackface; however, at that time endure all. In January 1919, Griffith joined Douglas Fairbanks, the blackface tradition dominated white America’s depiction of Mary Pickford, and Charles Chaplin in forming the United black life—even on the Broadway stage. The enormous response Artists Corporation, the same year signing a three-picture to Griffith’s film indicated that its depiction of blacks was neither contract with First National. offensive nor aberrational in the eyes of contemporary white Griffith’s program pictures of 1919 left war-torn Europe audiences. for the pastoral American idyll..., but his program pictures of The film’s enormous success converted an almost 1920 took him to the exotic shores of the South Seas and West anonymous artisan into a famous public figure, speaking and Indies. Griffith’s major releases of those years—Broken writing widely and frequently about “the freedom of the screen” Blossoms and Way Down East—were the last great commercial and the new art of the motion picture: “This is my art. . .whatever successes of his career. Both were adaptations of literary poetry is in me must be worked out in actual practice.” Nowhere successes: Broken Blossoms was based on “The Chink and the Griffith—BROKEN BLOSSOMS—7

Child” from Thomas Burke’s collections of stories, the hedonism of the Jazz Age. For Richard Schickel, Griffith Nights, Way Down East on the old stage war-horse by Lottie remained blind to the modernist literary currents around him, Blair Parker, William A. Brady, and Joseph R. Grismer, which resolutely tied to the genteel literary fashions of his youth. had been tugging hearts since 1897, one year after Griffith Various other factors contributed to Griffith’s decline. himself took to the stage. Unlike his colleagues and contemporaries at , In Broken Blossoms, a saintly Chinese (Richard Griffith was a careless businessman who delegated the Barthelmess) comes to offer his pacifistic Buddhism to the management of his financial affairs to apparently incompetent brawling, warring West. Instead, the Yellow Man, as he is called, others. In 1920 he left Hollywood for a new studio in falls victim to the opium-induced apathy of London’s Chinese Mamaroneck, New York, the cost of which kept him severely in slum, Limehouse. Nearby lives the brutal prizfighter, Battling debt. If Griffith made a mess of his business affairs, he brought Burrows (Donald Crisp) and his delicate daughter Lucy (Lillian even less order to personal matters. The intensity of his films had Gish), whom he mercilessly beats. Despite Lucy’ sorrow and always reflected emotional relationships with his women stars, degradation, Burrows insists that she keep up a pretense of especially and Lillian Gish. In the 1920s Griffith cheerfulness. Incapable of a spontaneous smile, she uses two transferred his emotional attention to a lesser actress, Carol fingers to poke one into her cheeks—one of the most memorable Dempster. As Richard Schickel observes, “Whatever happiness gestures in film history. When Lucy seeks the Yellow Man’s we may imagine her bringing him in the years they were protection from her father’s beatings, her death, the Yellow together, the cost of her presence at the center of his work for Man’s murder of Burrows in revenge, and his own seppuku close on seven years was exorbitant.” To accompany his suicide follow as inevitable consequences. There is very little disastrous relationship with an apparently inept Galatea, Griffith action to this sustained mood piece, which is dominated by the began drinking heavily. rapt faces of Gish and Barthelmess; the delicate imagery of While his personal life crumbled, his public drifted flowers, the trances, hypnotic away. As ordinary program rhythms of editing; and the pictures, his films of the 1920s moody lighting by Henrik were not bad. But they bore the Sartov, imported as Bitzer’s name of Griffith, from whom photographic assistant for the everyone—himself included— Gish close-ups. Released in expected great things.. In the the same year as the German context of the decade’s cinematic expressionist classic, The explosion—the comedies of Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Chaplin, Keaton, Langdon, and Broken Blossoms is regarded Lloyd; the European challenges by many as the first American of Lubitsch, Lang, Murnau, art film. Eisenstein, Gance, and Clair; the Way Down East American genre epics of Ford, works in a very different Vidor, Walsh, Cruze, and King— key—with more violent Griffith’s films seemed frozen in action, moralistic the past. Although some critics, commentary, and like Andrew Sarris, found psychological detail. Seduced Griffith’s first sound film, by a false marriage vow, Anna Moore (Lillian Gish) gives birth Abraham Lincoln (1930), fluid beside its static contemporaries, to an illegitimate child who died in her arms. She recovers from Griffith’s final film, The Struggle (1931), was a clumsy reprise of her personal tragedy through hard work with a Maine family, The Drunkard’s Reformation of 1909. which Griffith depicts with his familiar mixture of sympathy for Through the 1930s there was hope and talk of a Griffith their human warmth and criticism for their moral severity. When comeback, and he even went to England to discuss a remake of they discover Anna’s “stain,” she rushes out into a blinding Broken Blossoms. Griffith ruined most of those hopes with heavy snowstorm, which Griffith filmed during an actual New York drinking, irascible behavior, and incurable womanizing. His one blizzard. The literal and natural storm becomes an objective Hollywood job in seventeen years was as advisor to producer Hal correlative of her emotional turmoil. The farmer’s son David Roach in 1941 on One Million B.C., a sound-film expansion of (Richard Barthelmess), who loves her, follows her into the storm Griffith’s 1912 Biograph fantasy of prehistoric life, Man’s and eventually rescues her from the ice floe on which she is Genesis. Griffith retired to Kentucky, where he worked on plays, drifting toward the falls. This was Griffith’s final variation on the film scripts, and his memoirs: none was ever completed. Like last-minute rescue—this time not a race between horses, Chaplin, Griffith settled late in life into a comfortable marriage automobiles or trains but between human protagonists and with a younger woman, Evelyn Baldwin—but only for a while. immense elemental forces. The tight cutting and powerful natural They separated after a decade in 1947. He died in a Hollywood imagery of snow, wind, and ice create another of the most hotel room, not precisely broke but certainly alone. With his memorable sequences in the history of the cinema. death Griffith became the hero of a sentimental melodrama that In the final decade of his creative life Griffith fell he himself might have filmed—the poetic genius crushed by steadily and drastically in public esteem…. For Lewis Jacobs, crass commercial expediency. Griffith’s sentimental Victorian moralism was inconsistent with Griffith—BROKEN BLOSSOMS—8

Instead, one might see Griffith as a tragic rather than a the studio staff to keep the curious from trying to invade the pathetic figure: the powerful embodiment of a particular place studio.” and time, with consummate skills suited exactly to that place and time, but to no others. James Agee said, “He lived too long, and D.W. Griffith An American Life. Richard Schickel. Limelight, that is one thing sadder than dying too soon. There is not a man NY, 1996 working in movies or a man who cares for them who does not It was Mary Pickford who first directed Griffith’s owe Griffith more than he owes anybody else.” Griffith, who attention to a volume of short tales called Limehouse Nights by from 1908 to 1918 virtually was film history, was ultimately the English writer Thomas Burke. He might well have found it condemned by history to history. himself, the book having been a best-seller, but she obviously recognized that the writer and the director were kindred spirits. The Parade’s Gone By. . . Kevin Brownlow. UCal Press LA Both were drawn to poverty as a setting, to melodrama as a 1968 structure and to a prose style they thought of as poetic but others The Birth of a Nation was the first feature to be made in might regard as merely empurpled. At any rate, Griffith read the same fluid way as pictures are made today. It was the most Burke’s book, which was published in 1917, and found himself widely seen production of the time and it had the strongest particularly engaged by the first story in it, “The Chink and the influence. Child.” The reason is not hard to discern. Once again an innocent Technical considerations apart, The Birth of a Nation is child-woman (in the book she was only twelve) lives in dire fear an achievement which needs to be given a context. Astounding in of an animalistic older man—in this case her father, a its time, it triggered of so many advances in film-making prizefighter named Battling Burrows, who, having sired her technique that it was rendered illegitimately, ragefully resents her obsolete within a few years. presence in his life, administering Griffith was well aware of savage beatings to her for offenses his own contributions to motion that are minor, and, in some cases, pictures. He once said he loved imaginary. In the Burke story, Lucy’s Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, and protector, “the Chink” of the title, “particularly loved the ideas he meets her in a whorehouse, where she took from me.” has been taken by a friend after her father has locked her out of their Melodramatic treatment home. In the tale the “Chink” is a was dangerous enough for political frequenter of opium dens and subjects; when it appeared with gambling rooms, but her plight racial connotations it became touches the better side of his nature, downright offensive. and their relationship, of course, After The Birth of a remains utterly chaste. After her Nation outcries, the Negro did not friendship is discovered by her father appear again as a villain. He was relegated to atmosphere, or and he beats her to death, the Chinese gains his revenge by comedy bit parts. As it happened there were very few Negroes in inserting a venomous snake in Burrlows’ bed. California, and white actors often had to don blackface to play Griffith retained the essence of the story (and some of such Negro roles as railroad employees. its prose for his titles), but there were substantial changes, The Birth of a Nation, released in 1915, was the first particularly in the character of the Yellow Man, as he was feature film to exploit fully the extraordinary power of editing. In carefully identified in the film, where he is given a fixed the truest sense of the word, this is a masterpiece; it served as an address—he keeps a shop— and a more generally idealistic example for the rest of the industry. nature. He is presented, in fact, as a devoted follower of Buddha, come to the West as a sort of missionary in reverse, to teach the Emotional climaxes in Griffith’s films, even more than gentle ways of his religion. The refinement of his sensibility in spectacular crowd shots, were known as “big scenes.” the movie version makes the contrast with the stupid, violent, and “Griffith approaches a big scene carefully,” said deeply prejudiced Burrows the more vivid. He is intended as an Frederick James Smith. “Mellowing preliminary—or ‘working example of Eastern virtue, and, implicitly, as a living criticism of up’—scenes are shot for days preceding. Then the day comes. Western values. Griffith even invented a little scene in which a Someone has said that a cathedral hush settles upon the studio. missionary (in Griffith’s terms yet another “meddler” or Griffith goes to his room and rests for an hour. The player goes “uplifter”) bound for the Far East, “to convert the heathens,” to his or her room and rests. Then the moment arrives. Stage presses a tract on the Yellow Man and an ironic title has him say carpenters hammers are stilled. Griffith begins to talk to the of the Christian: “I wish him luck.” player. He gives emotionally in direct ratio to the actor’s Beyond this the whole film is still another plea for response. Lillian Gish could reach an emotional climax easily. understanding amity among the peoples of the world. Even When the Broken Blossoms scene in the closet—still the screen’s without the existence of The Greatest Thing in Life to buttress highest example of emotional hysteria—was shot in Los the case, we can perhaps stipulate that Griffith’s prejudice did Angeles, the screams of Miss Gish, alternating with the cries of not extend beyond blacks and that it was mostly quiescent when Griffith, could be heard in the streets outside. It required most of the possibility of sexual congress across racial lines was absent. Griffith—BROKEN BLOSSOMS—9

In this connection, it is interesting to note that a scene in Burke’s great primitive poet, a man capable, as only great and primitive story, where the Chink kisses Lucy, and she eagerly, if artists can be, of intuitively perceiving and perfecting the innocently responds, is not present in the film. Nor is the mild, tremendous magical images that underlie the memory and but palpable, erotic charge of the story ever visible on the screen: imagination of entire peoples. ... at most the Oriental is seen in genteel longing for a love he This was the one time in movie history that a man of knows to be forbidden. Only in the sadism of Burrows do we great ability worked freely, in an unspoiled medium, for an sometimes scent a trace of the psychosexual. There is one other unspoiled audience, on a majestic theme which involved all that significant change in the translation of the story to screen in the he was; and brought to it, besides his abilities as an inventor and Yellow Man’s murder of Burrows. Instead of the rather elaborate artist, absolute passion, pity, courage, and honesty. The Birth of a and preposterous business of the snake—Griffith’s loathing of Nation is equal with Brady’s photographs, Lincoln’s speeches, reptiles was fanatic and, on location, he set men to work clearing Whitman’s war poems; for all its imperfections and absurdities it the area of snakes—a direct confrontation is set up. is equal, in fact, to the best work that has been done in this But it is Griffith’s manner of retelling this story, not his country. And among moving pictures it is alone, not necessarily comparatively minor tamperings with it, that imparts to the film as “the greatest”—whatever that means—but as the one great its singularity. And Lillian Gish’s remarkable performance as epic, tragic film. Lucy is what, in the final analysis, makes in unforgettable. (Today, The Birth of a Nation is boycotted or shown Between them, they transform what might have been no more piecemeal; too many more or less well-meaning people still than a melodrama into a film that, as a result of pace, visual excuse Griffith of having made it an anti-Negro movie. At best, design and touching performance, strikes a note of genuine this is nonsense, and at worst, it is vicious nonsense. Even if it tragedy. were an anti-Negro movie, a work of such quality should be shown, and shown whole. But the accusation is unjust. Griffith went to almost preposterous lengths to be fair to the Negroes as he understood them, and he understood them as a good type of Southerner does. I don’t entirely agree with him; nor can I be sure that the film wouldn’t cause trouble and misunderstanding, especially as advertised and exacerbated by contemporary abolitionists; but Griffith’s absolute desire to be fair, and understandable, is written all over the picture; so are degrees of understanding, honesty, and compassion far beyond the capacity of his accusers. So, of course, are the salient facts of the so-called Reconstruction years.)... My veneration for Griffith’s achievements is all the deeper when I realize what handicaps he worked against, how limited a man he was....He had noble powers of imagination, but little of the intricacy of imagination that most good poets also have. His sense of comedy was pathetically crude and numb. He had an exorbitant appetite for violence, for cruelty, and for the Siamese twin of cruelty, a kind of obsessive tenderness which at its worst was all but nauseating. Much as he invented, his work “David Wark Griffith” James Agee, The Nation, September was saturated in the style, the mannerisms, and the underlying 4, 1948 (Agee’s last film piece for The Nation, in Cinema assumptions and attitudes of the nineteenth century provincial Nation. Edited by Carl Bromley Thunder’s Mouth theater; and although much of that was much better than most of Press/Nation Books New York 2000) us realize, and any amount better than most of the styles and non- He achieved what no other known man has ever styles we accept and praise, much of it was cheap and false, and achieved. To watch his work is like being witness to the all of it, good and bad, was dying when Griffith gave it a new beginning of melody, or the first conscious use of the lever or the lease on life, and in spite of that new lease, died soon after, and wheel; the emergence, coordination, and first eloquence of took him down with it. I doubt that Griffith ever clearly knew the language; the birth of an art: and to realize that this is all the good from the bad in this theatricality; or, for that matter, clearly work of one man.... understood what was original in his work, and capable of almost The most beautiful single shot I have seen in any movie unimaginably great development: and what was over-derivative, is the battle charge in The Birth of a Nation. I have heard it essentially non-cinematic, and dying. In any case, he did not praised for its realism, and that is deserved; but it is also far manage to outgrow, or sufficiently to transform, enough in his beyond realism. It seems to me to be a perfect realization of a style that was bad, or merely obsolescent.... collective dream of what the Civil War was like, as veterans There is not a man working in movies, or a man who might remember it fifty years later. Or as children fifty years cares for them, who does not owe Griffith more than he owes later, might imagine it.... anybody else. This is, I realize, mainly subjective; but it suggests to . me the clearest and deepest aspect of Griffith’s genius: he was a

Griffith—BROKEN BLOSSOMS—10

The online PDF files of most of these handouts have color images

Coming up in the Fall 2014 Buffalo Film Seminars: Sep 2 Fritz Lang, M, 1931 Sep 9 , THINGS TO COME, 1936 Sep 16 , RED RIVER, 1948 Sep 23 Robert Bresson, PICKPOCKET, 1959 Sep 30 Luis Buñuel, VIRIDIANA, 1961 Oct 7 Agnès Varda, CLEO FROM 5 TO 7, 1962 Oct 14 , REDBEARD, 1965 Oct 21 Nicolas Roeg, PERFORMANCE, 1970 Oct 28 Víctor Erice, THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE, 1973 Nov 4 Roman Polanski, TESS, 1979 Nov 11 Sydney Pollack, TOOTSIE, 1982 Nov 18 Joel and Ethan Coen, FARGO, 1996 Nov 25 Erik Skjoldbjaerg, INSOMNIA, 1997 Dec 2 Mike Nichols, CHARLIE WILSON’S WAR, 2007

CONTACTS: ...email Diane Christian: [email protected] …email Bruce Jackson [email protected] ...for the series schedule, annotations, links and updates: http://buffalofilmseminars.com ...to subscribe to the weekly email informational notes, send an email to addto [email protected] ....for cast and crew info on any film: http://imdb.com/ The Buffalo Film Seminars are presented by the Market Arcade Film & Arts Center and State University of New York at Buffalo with support from the Robert and Patricia Colby Foundation and the Buffalo News

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And coming up at Hallwalls:

The Erotic Dream Machine: 3 Films by Alain Robbe-Grillet Wednesday, September 17, 2014, 7pm L’immortelle (1963) Thursday, October 2, 2014, 7pm Trans-Europ Express (1966) Thursday, October 16, 2014, 7pm Eden and After (1970) Series curated by Jake Mikler. All films: $8 General Admission; $6 Students/Seniors; $5 Hallwalls’ members

"Half a century before Fifty Shades of Grey, Robbe-Grillet choose sadomasochism as his poetic muse and built an entire filmography around it." — Film Comment

Alain Robbe-Grillet is best well known as a French Novelist affiliated with the nouveau roman (new novel), a group of French writers that also included Michel Butor, Nathalie Sarraute, and Marguerite Duras, who set out to radically alter the conventions of the traditional novel. Robbe-Grillet's first foray into the realm of cinema is probably his most widely known amongst film goers, penning the script for Last Year At Marienbad (1961), directed by Left Bank filmmaker, Alain Resnais. Although this film is widely known, many are unfamiliar with the filmography that would follow (he did 9 films in all). This series sets out to expose audiences to the overlooked films that Robbe-Grillet would go on to create. These films, like Marienbad and his novels, are a surrealist's dream, in which the apparent contradictions between the real and the imagined, the subjective and the objective, can cease to exist. The films are intricately linked in their diversion from convention, filled with ambiguity, narrative uncertainty, and a healthy dose of sadistic eroticism.