Broken Blossoms or The Yellow Man and the Girl

A man who has come from China to London keeps a small shop in Limehouse. He finds a young girl beaten by her father on the street, takes her in, and shows her a kindness nobody has shown her before. The father learns where she is. The film is not interested in love. It is interested in the inevitability of violence: it builds a brief refuge and offers no consolation while tearing it down. The scene of Lillian Gish shut in the closet is counted among the harshest minutes in silent cinema. The form is soft: Billy Bitzer's misty, gauzed photography and the Limehouse built in the studio give the film a dreamlike consistency, which grows more disturbing as events harden. D.W. Griffith directed, from a story in Thomas Burke's collection Limehouse Nights. The film is usually read as a gesture against the racism of The Birth of a Nation; against that, the Chinese character being played in makeup by a white actor, Richard Barthelmess, is its hardest aspect today. Lillian Gish plays the girl and Donald Crisp the father. Who it is for: viewers looking at silent film history and Lillian Gish's performance. Who it is not for: anyone who cannot wave away the representational habits of the period. Even while trying to be tender, the film keeps its Chinese character in a place of pity.