Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2005 Sommario / Contents

amatissimo da Griffith – viene rovesciato e liquidato come irrilevante.
La polizia locale, informata dell’assassinio di Burrows, corre alla volta
del negozio di Cheng per arrestarlo. Griffith inizia il montaggio
alternato tra la corsa della polizia e i preparativi di suicidio del cinese,
come se intendesse mettere in scena l’ennesimo intervento salvifico.
Ma, concentrandosi sulle attività rituali di Cheng, Griffith perde ogni
interesse per l’avanzata dei poliziotti; e costruendo la scena del
suicidio in un profluvio di campanelle da preghiera, incenso, candele,
fiori, e icone dall’aspetto di bambole, la trasforma nella scena dei sogni
frustrati e dell’amore infelice di Cheng. Di conseguenza, i
“soccorritori” si riducono al ruolo di intrusi profani, e tutte le nozioni
di “salvataggio”, con annesso arresto finale da parte dei poliziotti,
vengono fatte apparire ingenue e grossolane.
Le autorità, naturalmente, arrivano troppo tardi, e perfino il loro ruolo
di spettatori inconsapevoli viene minimizzato. Quando arrivano nel
negozio di Cheng Huan, come ha scritto Edward Wagenknecht,“noi li
vediamo entrare ma non entriamo con loro” (Edward Wagenknecht e
Anthony Slide, The Films of D.W. Griffith, 1975). Per la prima volta nella
sua carriera, Griffith salta la scena clou dell’incontro tra gli aspiranti
salvatori e il loro obiettivo. Nell’ultima sequenza, Griffith rimette al
passo la forza propulsiva della narrazione lineare per completare il suo
disegno simmetrico. Quando le autorità entrano nel negozio di
Cheng, invece di mostrarci ciò che vedono, Griffith conclude il suo film
come l’aveva cominciato: un monaco buddista percuote il gong del
tempio e una nave esce dal porto di Shanghai. – RUSSELL MERRITT
[DWG Project # 576]
Broken Blossoms is Griffith’s most intricate film; in fact, it is probably the
most intricately designed American silent ever made. Formal complexity in
itself is not a virtue, of course. But the formal perfections of Broken
Blossoms are ideally suited to the requirements of Griffith’s narrative.
Roger Shattuck, commenting on modern painting, described one pleasure
of viewing abstract painting as projecting our personal associations onto
the non-representational lines. The pleasures we take from Broken
Blossoms are of the opposite kind: in it, we may disrobe Griffith’s
depiction of a natural world to find an underlying beauty of form.
We can respond, too, to the risks Griffith took with his new story. I do not
have in mind the box office dangers – although charging $3.00 in 1919
for a low-budget 6-reeler takes a certain kind of outrageousness. But it is
Griffith’s willingness to force himself into uncharted, psychologically
threatening terrain that remains remarkable. In Broken Blossoms he
lowers his guard. Activities obviously taboo or excoriated in The Birth of
a Nation and Intolerance – miscegenation, auto-eroticism, voyeurism,
opium eating, and revenge killing – are transformed into sensually
satisfying activities that resonate in dangerously non-conformist ways.The
few references to post-war 1919 American culture in the film, far from
catering to the nation’s rampant xenophobia and mood of selfcongratulation,
hint at the dark side of American provincialism. For once
in Griffith’s work, racial bigotry is a target for bitter reproach.The glancing
allusions to munitions workers, American sailors, and the First World War
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are no less remarkable. In contrast to Griffith’s customary utopianism,
they indicate a bleak, self-destructive society driven by violence and
ignorance.
This little film, which was shot in 18 days on a modest budget of $92,000,
was first regarded as a routine programmer.When Griffith sought to have
it distributed as a special, Adolph Zukor turned him down, reportedly
saying,“You bring me a picture like this and want money for it? Everybody
in it dies!” Finally, at the urging of his own top advisors, Griffith bought his
film back and toured it on the Klaw and Erlanger theatre circuit as an
elegant roadshow attraction. It became a sensational hit.Then he sent it
around to regular movie houses as his first release for the newly formed
United Artists Corporation. Riding the wave of Griffith’s lavish publicity
campaign, Broken Blossoms became one of United Artists’ first three
major moneymakers.
Today, Broken Blossoms’ critical stock continues to soar; in the past 10
years, it has probably attracted more fresh analysis than even Intolerance
and The Birth of a Nation. Provocative investigations of the narrative,
Griffith’s unorthodox marketing and exhibition strategies, the film’s
relationship to contemporaneous anti-Asian stereotypes, its promotion as
an art film, and its rendering of class structure have yielded unusually
interesting results.
But it is also of interest as a narrative. Unlike its overwhelming and diffuse
predecessors, The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, Broken
Blossoms is marked by a deceptively simple, apparently straightforward
style. Perhaps for this reason, the internal organization of its narrative has
generally gone overlooked.Yet, this apparent artlessness in fact reveals a
mastery of the medium that in subtlety and nuance seems to me no less
exciting than the more blatant experimentation of Intolerance.
Above all, Broken Blossoms is a film marked by terrific compression.The
concentration of time and space give characters, objects, and decor a
sustained metaphorical power that is never dissipated.
Griffith uses conventional elements traditionally employed to show the
seamy life of Limehouse: an opium den, a gambling house, a curio shop,
Burrows’ hovel. But, curiously, he strips these locales of their prosaic and
sordid details.The stark street Cheng Huan lives on is clean and pristine;
the harbor outside Lucy’s apartment motionless and near-empty. The
contrast between homeland and faraway slum falls along the line of
vitality versus lifelessness rather than Burke’s hackneyed notions of
physical cleanliness versus grime (Burke is forever reminding his reader of
“mephitic smells”,“grimey paws”, and “slime-ridden slums” in Limehouse).
The opium den is seen literally through a romantic haze (Henrik Sartov’s
soft-focus lens at work), the exotic details (musicians, instruments, a
female opium eater lying on the couch) picked out in sharp focus.
Although, predictably, Griffith features the intermingling of races as an
illustration of sordidness, the cut-ins lend the den an air of classical order
and serenity that fights against ideas of degeneration. The Hogarthian
slum streets in films like Chaplin’s Easy Street and Borzage’s
Humoresque give way to vacant, quiescent Hopper-like cityscapes.
The parallels Griffith draws between Lucy and the Yellow Man are
substantial, but in the end the differences are more important than the