A Film Canon

The most hyperbolic, surreal and visionary of Griffith's period pieces, Orphans Of The Storm takes the perfect subject for their trademark reconstruction of history according to melodramatic, rather than political, imperatives - the French Revolution - and, in doing so, explicates Griffith's underlying transhistoricity as a tendency to anachronistically fuse opposite sides of an argument, rather than adopt one with any consistency. Hence the distrust both of the aristocrat and the commoner, the latter frankly described as a proto- Bolshevik or proto-anarchist, as well as the ingenious narrative compromise - a redistribution of wealth that occurs largely as a result of the reunion of an aristocratic family and their estranged, impoverished daughter Henriette (Lillian Gish), and foster daughter Louise (Dorothy Gish); or, alternatively, the daughters' recognition that wealth has inhered in them all along, contextualising their mistreatment at the hands of the impoverished among whom they moved. The result is a sublime relocation of all the oppositions informing the Revolution into that between the daughters and the mob. Not only does this produce the most intense (if not expansive) crowds in Griffith's oeuvre to date - to the extent that the Revolution becomes a giant, writhing, orgiastic dance, ultimately continuous with the aristocratic revels that it was intended to oppose - but it takes melodramatic female vulnerability to such a point of abjection as to explicate its latent erotic appeal, as Louise, blind (and so embodying the hallucinatory quality of the entire film, its melodramatic conflation of what is with what might be) spends most of the narrative in a dungeon, and Henriette is taken from the Bastille, to the Tribunal, and, finally, to the guillotine, after being paraded along the streets of Paris in a crown of thorns.