Broken Blossoms

Now begins a new and exciting era of film viewing; a graduate-level film theory course, and the films it necessitates. I shall become insufferable on the subject of film.

This abnormally depressing specimen by D. W. Griffith fascinates me for a few reasons. The colors shift from blue at night, sepia indoors, and red in China. They're nonspecific (the whole screen changes color), but fascinating shifts with interesting meanings. Dark blues (violet) in the street. . . What Does It Mean!?

The scenes in China are strongly anglicized, I'm sure. The scene of the chinese family, the father giving children coins, feels English. The leading man's mission to convert the Anglo-Saxon is just European orientalism with the roles reversed (in London, he has a conversation with an English missionary, to emphasize the irony). Did the Chinese bother to convert the English to Buddhism? It doesn't seem an evangelical religion in the slightest - very welcoming, but not proselytized.

The lead male, as Chinese, is portrayed as kindly and well-meaning, but weak and dissolute. His love for an abused girl is a cultural transgression (in the eyes of English patriarchal society) that the film cannot allow to be successful, though the audience sympathizes with the pair.

It seems, on this note, significant that Cheng Huan doesn't try to sleep with Lucy. "His love remains pure and holy." In pre-code Hollywood, the significance is not lost.

The femal lead (Lillian Gish), acts very well. The way she forces a smile with her fingers, curls up on the rope at the dock, flinches back from her abusive father, they all catch the character forcefully.