<i>Broken Blossoms</i> (1919): Griffith and Conscious Expressiveness in the Early Days of Classicism

Abstract

The films D. W. Griffith made after Intolerance (1916) usually attract little interest. However, in 1919, when the so-called classical cinema era had just barely begun, the American filmmaker released Broken Blossoms, a film that is characterised by a systematic and deliberate experimental quality, which encapsulates and at the same time amplifies many of the expressive innovations that appear sporadically in his earlier films. This article offers an analysis of the different elements of the mise-en-scène in Broken Blossoms, which, in a quest for a greater expressiveness of the image, go far beyond a purely functional role and break with classical norms, thereby placing Griffith’s work in frontier territory between two different modes of representation.