Social Issues in Silent Film Classic at MSUM

By Christopher P. Jacobs
Staff Writer

This year’s weekly Summer Cinema series at MSUM every Monday night is now more than half over, but fans of the silent era have some special treats in store the rest of this month. Next week’s film, “Broken Blossoms” (1919), is one of the major works by legendary director D. W. Griffith. The following week is “The Perils of Pauline” (1947), a colorful musical comedy that pays tribute to (and features stars from) the early days of moviemaking. The last Monday of July is a classic from silent comedy great Buster Keaton, “Seven Chances” (1925).

All titles in the Summer Cinema series will screen on 16mm film in MSUM’s Weld Hall auditorium, starting at 7:30 pm with a brief spoken introduction, a classic cartoon or short comedy, and then the main feature. Silent films will all have a live musical accompaniment played on the “mighty Wurlitzer” theatre pipe organ, and all showings will have a preshow organ prologue performed by members of the American Theatre Organ Society’s Red River Valley chapter.

Today, those people who are aware of D. W. Griffith most likely associate his name only with the controversy caused by his most famous film, “The Birth of a Nation.” That massive three-hour family saga set during the American Civil War and Reconstruction era was a boxoffice sensation that revolutionized the movie industry from production to distribution to exhibition. However, its racial attitudes and especially its sympathetic portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan, have caused protests from the time of its 1915 release to the present day, including a showing in New York just a few months ago.

Griffith was a filmmaker who never shied away from controversial topics if he believed there was a good human story in them. It is unfortunate that the continued notoriety of “The Birth of a Nation” has caused many people who have seen only that film of Griffith’s (or merely read about it) to dismiss all of his works as “racist” without even seeing them. If next Monday’s MSUM film had been the one that got all the headlines, modern public perception of Griffith would be the exact opposite of what it is today.

“Broken Blossoms” is at once a tender, sympathetic portrayal of an interracial romance and a bitterly ironic condemnation of social hypocrisy, intolerant bigotry, and the still-prevalent attitudes of cultural and religious superiority. It is also one of the first and still few major films to deal seriously and intensely with violent child abuse.

An idealistic young Chinese man comes to England to preach his eastern philosophy of peace, but soon finds himself a disillusioned shopkeeper in a London slum. There he befriends and helps shelter an abused adolescent girl who is regularly beaten by her prizefighter father. When the father learns of the situation his narrow mind and violent temper lead to a terrible confrontation.

Acclaimed by many critics from the time of its release through the present day as Griffith’s greatest film, “Broken Blossoms” may well be the first tragic masterpiece of the cinema. Far more intimate than the epics like “The Birth of a Nation” and “Intolerance,” which made Griffith’s name a household word, it is a delicate story of characters and ideals caught up in an inexorable destiny. Many critics also find the eloquent plea for racial tolerance less embarrassing to embrace than the controversial “The Birth of a Nation.”

The beautiful cinematography, frequently using diffusion filters as well as masking to change the shape of the image, sets the story’s mood brilliantly, accentuated by subtle pastel color tints that soften the harshness of the London Limehouse setting. In large theatres, the film was accompanied by a specially commissioned orchestra score by Louis F. Gottschalk, a rarity for its time.

Like nearly all of Griffith’s films, “Broken Blossoms” has a certain mannered, presentational style with an underlying streak of Victorian sentimentality and preachiness that may seem quaintly at odds with its progressive, humanistic outlook and sometimes wry social commentary.
The only real drawback is the stylized, exaggerated performance given by Donald Crisp as the brutish father, in stark contrast to the often extreme underplaying by Richard Barthelmess (whose “yellowface” makeup may also prove a minor distraction for some viewers). Lillian Gish gives perhaps the most sensitive performance of her career, playing a girl nearly half her age.

While “Broken Blossoms” is available in a variety of DVD editions, it is more than worth the effort to see on a big screen projected from film, especially with a theatre organ musical accompaniment performed live for an audience. Unlike movies with recorded soundtracks, silent cinema was always an interactive art form. The picture remains a constant but the music when done right becomes almost a conversation between the musicians reacting to both the action on the screen and the response from the audience, different at every performance.

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If You Go

What: “Broken Blossoms”
Where: Weld Hall, MSUM
When: Mon, July 12, 7:30pm
Info: 701.237.0477