Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2005 Sommario / Contents

similarities. Lucy neither appreciates nor comprehends the love Cheng
Huan offers.The pleasures Lucy takes from the Yellow Man are those of
a battered, immature creature overwhelmed by the simple appeal of
material objects. The Yellow Man’s apartment becomes for her a magic
wigwam that fuses with her mother’s gifts as a representation of beauty,
with no associations beyond its exotic splendor. Lucy, who has an aversion
to being touched (unsurprising in view of her father’s way with a whip),
only lets the Yellow Man put his hand on her when she is preoccupied with
the beautiful things he gives her (like the robe and Oriental hair-braid that
replaces the ribbons).The doll, both literally and figuratively, becomes the
source of that expression – Lucy’s attention deflected from Cheng Huan
onto his gift.
The possibility of a satisfactory resolution to the relationship is constantly
brought up, only to be deflected.The expressions of wonder on her face
as she looks in the mirror, touches her lips, and smiles up at him, suggests
that she is discovering herself, and that there may be some possibility of
contact between them. But her next move is to stroke his cheek as if he
were a cat and say,“What makes you so good to me, Chinky”.
The Yellow Man reacts to her ignorant question with a smile, but the
barriers Griffith creates by contrasting Lucy’s lower-class ignorance and
prejudice with the Yellow Man’s high-caste idealism only enlarge upon the
gulf created by their contrasting dreams and images of each other.
Battling Burrows’ intervention, in other words, is not really what destroys
the relationship. The love affair itself is built on illusions that make it
impossible for either lover to see the other straight on; there is no way the
affair can grow.
From our perspective, what is remarkable is that both the potential and
limitations of the relationship are so intimately associated with readings
of props and decor. It is a love affair built on multiple associations given
to dolls, flowers, ribbons, incense, and beautiful clothes; on lovers each
locked into perceptions of objects, built on previous dreams and
aspirations, that the other frequently cannot share.
By paring down the repertoire of elements within the mise-en-scène and
constantly recycling them, Griffith creates a clever mystification by which
details and gestures are made to appear significant by the sheer fact of
their repetition rather than by any demonstrable meaning. They hint at
secret affinities; secret correspondences. But they generate only boobytrap
comparisons that lead nowhere.This severe compression also helps
Griffith arrest – or check – narrative progression.The constant leapfrog
back and forth among such scattered details buried practically
everywhere within the narrative encourages us to read the film as a
mosaic – taking us back and forth as we link new details with old ones
even as the narrative pulls us forward.Within this context, the repetition
of Cheng Huan’s advance on Lucy belongs to the plenitude of
comparisons that link all three characters and their three settings, but
which may have no further significance than enforcing a certain formal
tidiness.
If, at any rate, the scene momentarily calls into question Cheng Huan’s
heroism, the end of the film both restores and redefines it.When Lucy is
stolen from him, the Yellow Man knows what he has to do.After his initial
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hysterical collapse (where his crouched position at the side of the bed,
clutching the torn robe to his cheek, echoes Lucy’s position as she
clutched her doll in bed), he rises and finds his pistol. He has lost both his
idealized beloved and his pacifism, and takes violence as the only
alternative. At last he confronts Battling Burrows, in a scene marked with
subtle ironies and final reverses.
The assignment of weapons confounds all conventional associations of
Asian and white. In Burke’s story, Cheng Huan leaves a snake as the fatal
“love gift” for the prizefighter. In Griffith’s film, however, the snake imagery
is associated with Battling Burrows’ whip, used to torment and beat the
helpless Lucy. The hatchet Burrows reaches for has even more direct
Oriental associations, as a traditional Chinese execution weapon. Cheng
Huan’s six-shooter, on the other hand, is not only an emblem of Western
violent justice; it is the one weapon entirely free from those all-pervading
Fu Manchu-hatchet man Oriental connotations. The end recalls the
beginning, with the “rightness” of the Yellow Man’s decision seen in
Western terms. He exterminates Battling Burrows in an act of revenge,
the Buddha’s “message of peace” discarded in favor of the Old Testament
“Vengeance is mine”.
After the cascading series of losses, reversals, and separations, the only
solution possible is self-annihilation. Having sunk to the level of Westernstyle
revenge-killer, Cheng expiates with an act of Asian-style hara-kiri.
Confusing Chinese with Japanese custom, Griffith ends with a final
interweaving of poetic suffering and Asian mysticism. The one final
reference towards Western convention – this one closest to Griffith’s heart
– is reversed and then dismissed as irrelevant: the melodramatic lastminute
rescue.The local police, informed of Burrows’ murder, race to arrest
Cheng Huan at his shop. Griffith starts to cross-cut between the police
and the Yellow Man preparing for suicide, as if to set up another race for
life. But, concentrating on Cheng’s ritual activities, Griffith loses all interest
in the policemen’s progress, and in building Cheng’s suicide scene around
prayer bells, incense, candles, flowers, and doll-like icons, he turns the
scene into a reprise of Cheng’s frustrated dreams and doomed love affair.
The “rescuers” are turned into uninitiated outsiders, and all notions of
“rescue”, like concomitant notions of police arrest, are made to appear
naïve and boorish.
The authorities arrive too late, of course, and even their role as
uncomprehending onlookers is minimized. When they come to Cheng
Huan’s shop, as Edward Wagenknecht writes,“we see them enter but we
do not go in with them” (Edward Wagenknecht and Anthony Slide, The
Films of D.W. Griffith, 1975). For once in his career, Griffith skips over
the climactic shot of the would-be rescuers confronting their target.To the
very end, Griffith reins in the forward propulsive force of a linear narrative
in order to round off his symmetrical designs. As the authorities enter
Cheng’s shop, instead of showing us what they see, Griffith ends his movie
as he began it: a Buddhist monk strikes the temple gong and a ship
passes out of Shanghai harbor. – RUSSELL MERRITT [DWG Project # 576]
GRIFFITH