A Film Canon

At first glance, Broken Blossoms seems to represent a marked break from the conservatism of Griffith's earlier features, turning on the relationship between Cheng Huan (Donald Barthelmess), a Chinese immigrant living in London's Limehouse District, and Lucy Burrows (Lillian Gish), adopted daughter of local boxer Battling Burrows (Donald Crisp). However, as the marked absence of Griffith's trademark use of animals as ciphers for melodramatic vulnerability makes clear, both figures are imbued with an abject, sub- human innocence ("After dim aeons - dumbly, blindly, she struggles") that allows them access to beauty, but not sexuality, and ensures that their 'romance' is merely a mutual discovery of the humanity previously denied them. More striking is Griffith's break with the stylistic signature of his earlier features, their energetic scenarios replaced with the languorous melancholy of opium dens, incense-filled bedrooms and foggy, empty streets - or at least condensed into the sharp, genuinely shocking violence that concludes the narrative. Similarly, the intertitles are relatively free of meaningless verbosities, while the identification of Buddhism with Griffith's brand of Christianity (implicitly) and common decency (explicitly) doesn't prevent it becoming the pretext for an engagement with visual metaphor that remains largely uncharacteristic of his career; a crude calligraphic aesthetic.