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 103 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
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CATALOGO CATALOGUE LE GIORNATE DEL
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Davide Turconi, Prophet of the Sile
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Introduzioni e note di / Introducti
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esplorato in due pellicole: il risc
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Premio Jean Mitry / The Jean Mitry
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Eventi musicali / Musical Events EV
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THE MUSIC OF COMEDY LIBERTY (Hal Ro
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Laurel & Hardy silents routinely fe
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SHOCHIKU 110 - NARUSE 100 ZANJIN ZA
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al film, vendendo le copie a 16mm a
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EVENTO FINALE / CLOSING EVENT L’H
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Quando la Garbo ricevette il copion
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discreto. La rifacevo un tre-quattr
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26 PRIMA MONDIALE / A WORLD PREMIER
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tedesca. Pur lodato come un capolav
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cooperation with George Eastman Hou
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pellicole, padre Bamberger, e David
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macchina da presa rimane sempre fis
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La luce dell’oriente: omaggio al
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Prog. 2 ASAHI WA KAGAYAKU [L’ “
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sequenza iniziale, con Omitsu che e
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and the happy ex-convicts who enjoy
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Giappone anche per la serie del “
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JP 1932) Re./dir: Hotei Nomura; sog
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di montaggio e alla costruzione deg
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Antoine cineasta e il realismo fran
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INTOLERANCE (ABRIDGED), 87; 13 R IS
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