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DW Griffiths Broken Blossoms

Griffiths Imperial Aesthetic


The traces of imperialism can therefore be detected in Western modernism, and are
indeed constitutive of it; but we must not look for them in obvious places, in content or in
representation....They will be detected spatially, as formal symptoms, within the structure of First World modernist texts themselves.
Frederic Jameson, Modernism and Imperialism

I begin with a quote from Frederic Jameson who, it should be noted, was speaking of literature when he linked the political and economic structures of imperialism to
formal aspects of modernist texts. In spite of this apparent limitation, I want to propose
that D.W. Griffiths Broken Blossoms (1919) self-consciously constructed and marketed
as an art film, falls within the pale of Jamesons remarks (Dudley 41). My argument is
that the film operates within the context of emergent modernisms even as it draws on
popular genres such as melodrama and retains some of the Naturalistic elements found
in its literary source, Thomas Burkes The Chink and the Child (1917). Rather than attempting to reveal some sort of true or final meaning about the film-- a task which necessarily implies the dubious possibility of a transcendent critical perspective-- I will perform a close if selective reading, even as I am mindful of its historical moment. Above
all, I am concerned with thinking about Broken Blossoms as a text which performs particular kinds of cultural and political work. By examining the relationship between its
aesthetic aspirations, sources and effects, and suggesting their connection to the realities of United States imperialism, I hope to provide a possible perspective on contemporary cinema.
Low Naturalism? Burkes Bizarre Text

Naturalism, a term whose meaning has in recent years come under increasing
speculation, emerges in part as a response to the literary Realism of authors such as
William Dean Howells and Henry James, whose narratives treat primarily bourgeois
characters and issues. As a mode, Naturalism has roots in the popularization of Darwinian theories of evolution and the sort of racialist pseudo-science which made possible
deterministic criminal etiologies, among them Lombroso-Ferreros, which asserted that
the cranial bones [of criminals] are abnormally thick, a characteristic of savage peoples
(quoted in Jacoby 77). To risk over generalizing, Naturalism, as demonstrated by its major practitioners, usually depicts characters in underclass settings at the mercy of social
and biological forces beyond their control. In Frank Norriss McTeague, for instance,
the protagonist, McTeague, succumbs to innate racial flaws which, exacerbated by his
underclass circumstances, result in his degeneration and ultimate destruction.

Thomas Burkes Limehouse Nights (1917) the volume which features the short
story The Chink and the Child, operates within a naturalist mode, depicting in lurid detail the crimes and sufferings of a racialized working class. A bizarre text replete with
themes and images of sado-masochism, incest, pedophilia, and miscegenation, Limehouse Nights offers an instructive view of the culmination of the Naturalist cycle, some-

thing that might be called low Naturalism. The books voyeuristic appraisal of human
misery and deviancy realizes a kind of pathological zenith of the Naturalist mode. Like
the psychopulps of the 1950s, which reproduced and exceeded the originary texts of
American crime fiction, Limehouse Nights takes Naturalisms concern with degeneration
and squalor to a new, some would say fallen, level. What an irony, then, that it was Mary
Pickford, Americas sweetheart, who first brought Limehouse Nights to D.W. Griffiths
attention (Henderson 20). Perhaps her knowledge of Griffiths penchant for very young
women led her to recommend the book. Regardless, she presented him with a text
which seemed tailored to his own particular obsession with virginal female figures under
siege by racialized brutes.

The Naturalism of Limehouse Nights surfaces within Broken Blossoms in terms
of its story, though Griffith chooses to alter specific key moments in the literary text. The
most notable of these deviations occurs during the final struggle involving Burrows,
Cheng Huan, and Lucy. In the short story, Cheng Huan kills Burrows by placing a poisonous snake in his bed, what Burke calls a love-gift (37). In the film, however, Burrows dies from a gunshot. The difference in methods of killing point not only to the
dramaturgical demands of cinema-- death by venom registering as less climactic than
death by bullet-- but also to a complication of Cheng Huans gender identity. Murdering
his antagonist by means of a snake signals a type of feminine aggression, one deeply
rooted in a Western, Christian imaginary: Eves relationship with the serpent topples the
garden. Burke clearly wants to align Cheng Huan with underhanded (and thus) feminine
violence-- that the snake is Cheng Huans love-gift to Burrows seems as likely as that
it is his gift of revenge to the now-dead Lucy. Whereas Burrows meets his enemies
head on with fists, whip, and hatchet-- implements which, in their evocation of the tools
of both colonial master and savage, emphasize his hypermasculine brutality-- Cheng
Huan enacts violence indirectly. Thus when Griffith chooses to give Cheng Huan a gun,
he not only simplifies the dramatic conclusion of the film, he also reasserts a degree of
Cheng Huans problematic masculinity. Yet Griffith also contains this assumption of
phallic power by having (as does Burke) the masculine/feminine Cheng Huan commit
suicide. The act of killing oneself, as William Styron has written, is often thought of as
cowardly, morally feeble, a symptom of some essential frailty (32). Cheng Huans frailty,
initially presented in Broken Blossoms as his feminine appreciation of ornament and
briefly undermined in his murder of Burrows, reasserts itself with his suicide.

Griffiths strenuous efforts to create affect in a film with a relatively high body
count caused contemporaneous reviewers to designate Broken Blossoms as either a
melodrama, a tragedy, or both. A writer for the New York Times called Broken Blossoms
an artistic masterpiece which, though it might possibly be construed as Chinese
propaganda, ultimately resonated as a drama of pathos, culminating in tragedy. An
unsigned article for Variety seemed equally smitten with the work-- if unperturbed by the
possibility of pro-Chinese sentiment-- pronouncing the film the first genuine tragedy of
the movies, a label the articles author clarifies by explaining that an unhappy ending
doesnt constitute tragedy; tragedy seems fore-ordained; the drums of doom are sounding from the first.... [as] they are for Lucy. Recent critics such as Robert Lang have also
made the case for Broken Blossoms status as both tragedy and melodrama. Certainly
the film possesses highly melodramatic features, not the least of which are those staples of traditional melodrama: the maiden and the villain. Yet I would argue that none of

these generic conflations address one of the films most interesting effects: in straddling
genres-- in imbricating Naturalism, melodrama, and even tragedy-- Broken Blossoms
forges one particular version of film as a modernist text. The film accomplishes this end
by a multiple means, including its use of the formal innovations of soft-focus and the
projection of colored light. These formal elements recast the naturalistic content of the
story, effectively aestheticizing a tale whose grubby details were initially assembled to
titillate bourgeois readers.

Broken Blossoms opens with a soft-focus shot of sampans moving gently across
the water, an image that lends a dreamy and indistinct quality to the initial setting. The
audience thus enters the diegetic space of the film through an Orientalizing haze which
signifies not only Griffiths imperial tendencies (which I will discuss later) but also his
desire to have his work viewed as a product of high culture. Vance Kepley, as I have already mentioned, indicates that Griffith made every effort to ensure that Broken Blossoms was received by audiences and critics as high art. In order to accomplish this goal
Griffith manipulated the constitution of the audience by charging high ticket prices, selective distribution to chosen theaters, printing ads which foregrounded the films delicacy and artistry while omitting its rather squalid content, emphasizing its special lighting effects, and, most blatantly of all, presenting a one act ballet... entitled nothing less
than The Dance of Life and Death (44). All of these strategies were enacted to guarantee Broken Blossoms aesthetic elevation.

The soft-focus of the opening shot operates as a formal correlative to these carefully planned tactics. Like the ballet-- and as the baroque copy of ads for Broken Blossoms which claim that Griffiths directorial vision paints the lily and refines pure gold
in presenting a drama of exquisite delicacy suggests-- high art, according to Griffiths
idea of it, must be soft and even effeminate. To some extent Griffith takes his cue from
Burkes often treacley prose; the intertitles, with a few interesting exceptions, are taken
directly from The Chink and the Child. Yet it is Griffiths reworking of Burkes text
which provides the most telling evidence of the directors notable efforts to have his
work construed as high art. He redacts Burkes opening paragraph, for instance, significantly:
It is a tale of love and lovers that they tell in the low-lit Causeway that slinks from West
India Dock Road to the dark waste of waters behind. In Pennyfields, too, you may hear
it; and I do not doubt that it is told in far-away Tai-Ping, in Singapore, in Tokio, in Shanghai, and those other gay-lamped haunts of wonder whither the wandering people of Limehouse go and whence they return so casually. It is a tale for tears, and should you
hear it in the lillied tongue of the yellow men, it would awaken in you all your pity. In our
bald speech it must, unhappily, lose its essential fragrance, that quality that will lift an
affair of squalor into the loftier spheres of passion and imagination, beauty and sorrow.
It will sound unconvincing, a little... you know... the kind of thing that is best forgotten
(1).
Compare this passage with the films opening title: It is a tale of temple bells sounding
at sunset before the image of the Buddha. It is a tale of love and lovers: it is a tale of
tears (emphasis added).

Beyond the obvious fact that he has pared down Burkes passage considerably-a necessary change attributable to the limits of intertitling-- Griffith has taken a paragraph which rather disingenuously admits its own inability to render artfully what is es-

sentially a sordid story and compressed it into a set of soft images which contextualize
the films subsequent representations. The opening titles imagery-- bells, sunsets,
Buddhas, and tears-- the poetry of its assonance and alliteration, finds a visual correspondence in the mist which shrouds the drifting sampans of the initial shot. Yet the crucial difference between these two textual moments lies in the substitution of Burkes
for with Griffiths of. A tale for tears, which is maudlin enough, suggests that the
reader may be subject to the storys emotional affect. A tale of tears shifts emotional
affect to the characters, in particular Lucy, the only one the audience sees crying, and
even more specifically Lillian Gish. Griffiths film, then, has as its central concern the
tears of Lillian Gish.

This emphasis on tears suggests two lines of thought: first, that Griffith, as he
demonstrates in other films such as Birth of a Nation, exhibits a compulsion to punish
the figure of the presexual female for his own ambivalence about interracial desire. As
scholars such as Jaqueline Dowd Hall, Glenda Gilmore, and Michael Rogin have noted,
hatred for the racial Other often includes a phantasmatics of curiosity. Put simply, racism contains an element of attraction; the racist desires what he fears and loathes.
This paradox enables a discursive fantasy of the white female under threat from the
darker male, a set of assumptions which, in their most politicized forms, occlude the historical reality of subaltern sexual victimization at the hands of elites and lead to the
kinds of abuses of power demonstrated in the rise of Jim Crow. It is my contention that
Griffith displaces his complicated and voyeuristic desires onto the screen. His real life
desire for Gish (the two were romantically linked for a number of years) based in part on
her youthful appearance enacts a curious libidinal logic: in essence, (white) innocence
provokes (dark) desire which, if consummated or even suspected, must be punished by
the desiring voyeur who authors this tortured dialectic. The triangulated relationship of
Griffith, Gish and the dark other depends in part on what Gina Marchetti terms the Victorian cult of the virgin child (39). In other words, Griffiths desire for Gish-as-Lucy projects her into the arms of a racialized figure who threatens her vulnerability.

In Birth of a Nation Elsie escapes the grasp of her would be rapist and thus retains her purity. Yet the mere possibility of interracial sex is enough to condemn her;
having aroused (nonwhite) prurient interest she must jump to her death. In Broken Blossoms, we see the same mechanism at work, yet here Griffith doubles the racial other in
the forms of a feminized Cheng Huan and a hypermasculinzed Burrows. The dangers
besetting Lucy multiply as well: she risks, even in his slavish devotion, the corrupting
decadence of Cheng Huan in addition to the physical abuse of her racialized father.
The White Woman and the Racial Ape

A World War I recruiting poster designed by Harry Ryle Hopps titled Destroy This
Mad Brute (c. 1917-1918) depicts a slavering ape wearing a spiked helmet carrying a
club and a languishing white woman in his thick arms. The image is striking not only
because it visually parallels the relationship between Lucy and Burrows, but in that it
prefigures another cinematic interracial couple, King Kong and Fay Wray. The poster
represents a racialized German soldier who stands as the antithesis of an (American)
white masculine ideal. In Broken Blossoms, it is Burrows who represents this deviant
extreme, a figure whose hypermasculinity racializes and animalizes him. It might be difficult to verify the extent to which Griffith was influenced by posters like Hopps, yet it is
certain that Broken Blossoms makes explicit links between the image of the racialized

other in wartime propaganda and class propaganda at two key moments. In the first, we
witness Burrows boxing in front of a group of munitions workers, a scene to which I will
return. In the second, when Burrows cronies alert the police to his death, we see a cop
reading a newspaper and commenting, Only 40,000 killed this week. Though Griffiths
intent may have been to underscore the inherent brutality of man, his film establishes
other connections, specifically the (explicitly sexual) threats posed by a racialized underclass.

Re-examining the films opening, however, complicates this already tangled dynamics of desire and danger. The sequence after the initial soft-focus shot of the sampans involves three American sailors (Jackies the intertitle informs us) presumably on
liberty from their ship who are skylarking in the marketplace of a Chinese port. This trio
of US sailors stroll about, consuming the exotic sights. Rough but good natured-- and,
crucially, despite their fisticuffs, cast as playful rather than brutish-- they pay particular
attention to three Chinese women. The visual partnering of these six figures points to
other possibilities of interracial desire, possibilities that the rest of the film finally and explosively rearticulates. According to the Broken Blossoms logic, then, legitimate interracial desire is possible only when the object is female and other and the subject is male
and white. When this relationship is reversed, however, violent consequences ensue.

In addition to suggesting an alternative interracial phantasmatic, the three sailors
signify what TJ Jackson Lears has called the cult of strenuousness. At the most blatantly militaristic phase of US imperialism, during the wars in Cuba and the Philippines,
Theodore Roosevelt admonished young white American men to vivify their race by engaging in athletic pursuits, in particular the most athletic of these exercises, combat. Yet
with the onset of Word War I many proponents of a culture founded on the reverence for
a revisionist chivalric code-- a fascination with medieval virtue whose nearest historical
manifestations lay in Roosevelts splendid little war and the Civil War of an earlier generation-- disavowed the vitalizing prospects of military adventure in the face of mechanized warfares ignoble brutalities. Griffiths Jackies, a possible audience for Hopps recruiting poster, exemplify a gendered ideal that both Cheng Huan and Burrows fail to
meet. Even as they are implicitly responsible for defending the white woman from her
dark (national or class) antagonist, their healthy, playful masculinity marks them as
products of Broken Blossoms rejection of industrialized society. To borrow a word from
Lears, they represent one aspect of Griffiths antimodernism.

Not explicitly linked with the degenerative work of industrialization, the Jackies
personify the clean labor of a mythic maritime economy in a period prior to the dehumanizing and stultifying effects of a Taylorized and routinized space which Paddy in
Eugene ONeills The Hairy Ape (1921) perhaps describes best:
Oh there was fine beautiful ships them days-- clippers wid tall masts touching the sky-fine strong men in them-- men that were sons of the sea as if twas the mother that
bore them. Oh, the clean skins of them, and the clear eyes, the straight backs and full
chests of them! (126).

This paradigm of masculine excellence entails a virtually spiritual value, one
where sailors, working on a craft dependent on the natural force of the wind rather than
machines, are not yet alienated from their labor: Twas them days men belonged to
ships, not now. Twas them days a ship was part of the sea, and a man was part of a
ship, and the sea joined all together and made it one (127). Yank, the central character

of the play, striking in his similarity to Burrows, functions as a warning of the animalizing
and spiritually degenerative effects of industrial labor. Perhaps even more notable is
Yanks relationship to Mildred Douglass, whom ONeill describes as a girl of twenty,
slender, delicate, with a pale, pretty face (130). Taking a tour of the ship, Mildred descends to the industrial world of the engine room where she is so overwhelmed by
Yanks Neanderthal appearance that she faints. Again, as with Lucy and Burrows and
Kong and Fay Wray, we have the trope of the languishing white woman somehow
threatened by a racialized masculine presence.

ONeill characterizes Yanks ship as an industrial dungeon where the crew labors
imprisoned in white steel (121). The oceanliner draws its power from coal pried out of
the ground by regulated human labor. The mere fact of a steam-powered ships existence connotes an entire network of economic and social realities: miners descending
into the earth, the vibrato of heavy machinery, stockbrokers hawking company shares, a
managerial stratum of white collar workers. The coal burning ship that Yank crews on
implies a lattice of social conditions where nothing is free, where labor and capital and
the limits of personal freedom transmute one another. The wind driven ships of Paddys
youth on the other hand, though their energy source might be fickle, imply harmony with
natural forces and clean working conditions. Clipper ship sailors coexist with their environment; the work of the crew responds to natural rhythms-- tide shifts and gulf stream
flows and weather patterns-- which arrive without any attendant pricetag in terms of
human degradation. Griffith, by juxtaposing sampans with American sailors not only indicates the setting of the opening sequence, but establishes a connection between 19th
century navigation and 20th century politics. In essence, he codes an imperial project
which relies on industrial infrastructure as pre-industrial and romantic, in the process
expressing his nostalgic antimodernism and allowing the sailors, his and the male
members of the audiences surrogates, an escape.

This escape from industrialization initially presents itself under the sign of trade.
The sailors presence in the Chinese port implicates a wider sphere of global commerce, one characterized by the economic imperialism of the Open Door policy. What,
after all, are these three Americans doing in China if not to ensure that surplus American
goods find a market? That Griffiths antimodernist sailors are engaged in the modernizing task of promoting global trade suggests a species of contradiction prominent within
different stages of modernity when technological progress has been coupled with nostalgia for a simpler past. More importantly, however, the notion of an American project
of policing commercial exchange conjures the specter of Empire.

Broken Blossoms depiction of China as a site of United States military and economic intervention leads me to read the film as an allegory of the shockwaves of imperialism, specifically the consequences of Cheng Huans trajectory from the colonial periphery to the center of its metropole. The primary setting of Broken Blossoms, Londons Chinatown, serves to displace any critique of the American ghettoization of minority communities even as it asserts the decadence and degeneracy of both the Old World
colonial center and Chinese culture. Griffiths depiction of Londons Chinatown participates in an emergent tradition of Chinatown representations, one whose origins lie in
the early nineteenth century and which continue to present day. Historically, these representations have crossed generic lines, from press accounts to anti-immigration tracts
to novels and other fictive forms, many of which would have been available to Griffith.

With Broken Blossoms, the iconography of Chinatown resonates on multiple levels.


Prior to the films production Griffith and Richard Barthelmess visited Los Angeles Chinatown. Barthelmess later wrote that he absorbed a lot of Chinese atmosphere during
these expeditions, though he fails to explain just what sort of atmosphere and which
methods he employed for its absorption (quoted in Henderson 203). These trips apparently aided Barthelmess in refining his portrayal of Cheng Huan and fed Griffiths visualization of the film. The touristic gaze the two men no doubt assumed when wandering
the streets should be seen as a subtler version of Broken Blossoms imperial view. If we
accept tourism as a set of behaviors and beliefs with connections to ethnography, travel
writing, and, in its most pronounced form, imperialism, then what initially seems rather
trivial takes on an added significance. Drawing on his experiences as a tourist within a
space demarcated by domestic colonialism, Griffith interweaves diegetic and extradiegetic elements, reproducing within his film specific structures of seeing which register
most notably at a formal level with the use of soft-focus and color projection. These
techniques are closely aligned to his sense of the aesthetic.
Prize-fighting as Social Critique

In George Wesley Bellows painting Stag at Sharkeys, completed in 1909, two
boxers hurl themselves at one another, their arms, legs and torsos bleached almost
white by the lights above the ring. The arrested motion of these converging bodies immediately snags our gaze. The fighter in the dark trunks-- his right arm drawn back to
strike, his left forearm slamming into his opponents face-- seems on the verge of losing
his equilibrium. The boxer in the light trunks uncoils against his antagonist. Their postures denote a sprung energy, an impact of savage forces whose final result remains
uncertain. The referee, arms outstretched, features blurred, leans in to judge the blows.
He and the fighter in light trunks bracket the torqued frame of the boxer in dark trunks,
an effect that not only balances and focuses the painting but implicates the referee in
the struggle. He appears less a disinterested official than a fully engaged combatant.

The crowd surrounding the ring, faces alternately blanked by the flare of the
lights and obscured by the dark, huddle up to the edge of the canvas. One man, a stogie clamped between his teeth, looks back at an acquaintance and gestures toward the
action. Directly across from him another man with a cigar, hat brim casting a shadow
across his brow, stares vapidly at the contest. The faces of the rest of the crowd-- or
what can be discerned of them, for these figures are nearly faceless-- show boredom,
greed, and glee. Darkness surrounds them all. The indistinctness of their features requires us to perform a crucial embellishment even while it suggests the anonymity and
sameness of a mass society. These men could be any men; they are compelling precisely because of their interchangeability. Attempting to sharpen the images in the painting, we imagine the smell of tobacco, sweat, and booze, the shouts for destruction and
punishment.

If, in Stag at Sharkeys, the outcome of the match is in question, at least we know
for certain that one fighter will win and the other will lose. The world Bellows has constructed allows no draws; Stag at Sharkeys suggests the coldness of a deterministic
universe, one where victory and defeat are total. Whatever nobility the fight may have
possessed curdles under the gaze of the crowd. The battle between light and dark
trunks, which may, initially, have suggested a mythic, near-Manichean struggle, devolves into a spectacle for the working class men who watch it. On the periphery of this

scene, swing shift laborers still operate machines in factories and beat cops still patrol
alleys; Stag at Sharkeys intimates a darkened world that surpasses the brutality of a
prizefight.

The resemblance between the world of Bellows painting and the Limehouse district of Broken Blossoms extends, of course, to Burrows erstwhile occupation as a
boxer. And like the prizefighters in Stag at Sharkeys Burrows enacts a kind of workingclass theatre, trading blows for the amusement of a crowd of munitions workers. Within
this particular context, that the audience consists of men whose work it is to build the
weapons which enable the mechanized horrors taking place in the muddy fields of
Flanders, Burrows participates in the instrumentalization and commodification of violence. Griffiths critique is pointed, even heavy-handed: the industrialized violence of
modern warfare corresponds to the violence of athletic entertainments. Counterpointing
this Taylorized military aggression and its working-class counterpart is the pacifist philosophy of Cheng Huan, whose mission to civilize the barbarous Anglo-Saxons finds
its inverted double in the plan of the English missionaries he meets on the street to
teach the Chinese about the devil. On one level, this deepens the critique: the excessive zeal of Christianity incorporates a knowledge of evil, an evil which Burrows and the
munitions workers contribute to in their separate ways. Yet an irony is at work here.
Given the prevalence of racialist hierarchies, supported by scriptural interpretation and
pseudoscience which placed whites at the apex of human development, we might suspect that Griffiths intent has more to do with satirizing Cheng Huans presumptions than
the barbarousness of whites. While there might be some shred of truth in such a supposition, I am interested in this break with conventional racialist theories as one of Griffiths aesthetic strategies. Like the soft-focus opening shot of the sampans which Orientalizes the films first location, the soft imagery of the initial title card, and the extradiegetic tactics he employed to control Broken Blossoms reception, Griffiths use of
inversion, of valorizing a figure who ordinarily would be held in contempt, constitutes a
self-conscious effort to approach high art. It is with this latter strategy, in aestheticizing
the low culture of the masses and the strange ways of foreigners that he most closely
and superficially approaches the sort of canonical modernism associated with Joyce,
Eliot, and others.
Griffith the Secessionist

There are other indications of Griffiths nascent aesthetic and his impulse to a
modernist form of high art. The cinematic effect of the fog-laden streets of the Limehouse district evoke the visual experiments of the first avant-garde in American photography, the Photo-Secessionists. Two facts are important with regard to this correspondence: first, that Griffiths New York office was within walking distance of Alfred Steiglitzs studio, and second that Griffith based the visual display of Broken Blossoms in
part on the watercolors of George Baker, a practice similar to Photo-Secessionists efforts to emulate Impressionist painting (Orvell 124). Indeed, The New York Morning
Telegraph made a specific connection between Broken Blossoms and painting when its
reviewer gushed, Such art, so real one can think only of the classics, and of the masterly paintings remembered through the ages; so exquisite, so fragile, so beautifully and
fragrantly poetic is Broken Blossoms (quoted in Jacobs 339)

Steiglitzs most famous work, photographs of New York street scenes such as
The Rag Picker, Asphalters, and Winter-- Fifth Avenue, relied heavily on darkroom

manipulation-- the blurring of focus and the use of brushes and pen marks-- to soften
the lines of the image and produce an Impressionistic effect. Though he later moved to
the cleaner representation of straight photography, his earlier efforts attracted a great
deal of attention, as did the 291, his museum exhibitions, and the journal Camera
Work. Such visibility meant that in the years before World War I, Stieglitz provided a
center, a focal point of modernism in the New York art world (Trachtenberg 173).

Each of the photographs mentioned above present the streets of New York as
hazy and indistinct, thus calling attention to their own artifice. This emphasis on artistry
for its own sake, Alan Trachtenberg writes, ultimately indicates that
Stieglitz and his followers oversimplified the question of art in photography. Their real
thrust lay not in their claim that photographs can be art pictures but in their... identification of aesthetic with certain formulas... and their isolation of the aesthetic from social
functions. Identifying art with a certain look, they made camera work seem a matter of
achieving that look, thus implying that the true history of the medium lay in the history of
changing styles and techniques (175).

He might be referring to Griffith. In Broken Blossoms, the special cinematographic effects which Griffith so proudly explained to his audiences-- going so far as to
emphasize that these were techniques whose patents were pending-- function in much
the same way as the photographic experiments of the Photo-Secessionists: they constitute a self-conscious gesture, one which never penetrates past the surface of the film
into its narrative. In the same way, Griffiths rearticulation of Naturalist themes-- themes
already drawn into the orbit of kitsch-- never realizes a political perspective, instead satisfying itself with the sort of self-justifying platitudes which are melodramas stock in
trade. One of the films first intertitles-- not, it should be noted, found in Burkes story-informs the audience that Broken Blossoms aims are in part didactic:
We may believe that there are no Battling Burrows striking the helpless with brutal
whip-- but do we not ourselves use the whip of unkind words and deeds? So, perhaps,
Battling may even carry a message of warning.

Griffiths warning proofs his film against censure for its more lurid aspects-miscegenation, sado-masochism, drug use, and murder-- and in so doing turns aside
from the activist possibilities which a Naturalist mode presents by insisting that social
actions are always specifically contextual and material (Williams, 113). The film can
thus be seen as promoting the gathering irrelevance of Naturalism as an aesthetic
stance concerned with the social not for mere entertainment but as part of a program of
politically motivated criticism. Burkes story, to be sure, already inhabits the fringes of
this sense of Naturalism because it unreflectively provides an entryway into the lumpenproletarian underworld of Limehouse for a reading audience of bourgeois voyeurs.
Yet while I am not suggesting that Broken Blossoms refusal to adopt the tenets of socialist realism invalidates its status as a cultural artifact -- that, in other words, it is
somehow less valuable because of its implicit conservatism-- I am suggesting that this
movement away from Burkes (problematically) Naturalist text toward an aesthetic
linked to both modernist impulses and melodramas populist kitsch signals not only Griffiths efforts to have his work treated as high art, but a historical and ongoing trend in
American cinema and politics, a point to which I will return.
Above, in Front, and Below


The precondition for kitsch, Clement Greenberg writes in Avant-garde and
Kitsch,
...is the availability close at hand of a fully matured cultural tradition, whose discoveries,
acquisitions, and perfected self-consciousness kitsch can take advantage of for its own
ends. It borrows from it devices, tricks, stratagems, rules of thumb, themes, converts
them into a system and discards the rest (10).

Griffiths kitsch relies equally on well-established forms-- melodrama and the
low Naturalism exemplified by Limehouse Nights-- and the high art of Impressionist
painting, whose popularization at the 1913 Armory Show in New York cemented to the
point of reification its cultural capital. At the same time, his modernist, avant-garde pretensions are aligned with the artistic ferment instigated by the Photo-Secessionists as
well as a cultural atmosphere increasingly rarefied by other signs of the institutionalization of canonical modernism such as the founding of Poetry magazine in 1912. Add to
these disparate elements Griffiths decidedly Victorian tendencies, his embodiment of
the second side of America, that provincialism Sergei Eisenstein referred to when writing of Griffiths work which holds the traditional view that true art is necessarily uplifting
and feminine and soft (quoted in Rogin 198). We end up with a pastiche of aesthetic
positions, none ever fully articulated, all at some level interconnected. The result is a
work of art lodged solidly in the middlebrow.

Van Wyck Brooks, in his influential essay Highbrow and Lowbrow (1914)
writes that American culture is characterized by the fundamental absence of a genial
middle ground (7). He is speaking of the binaries so visible in American society during
his lifetime, polarities which, while still present today in terms of a widening economic
gap between rich and poor, have become decidedly complicated by pluralization of
taste. The very idea of canonicity, much less what constitutes the high/low divide, has
been radically challenged by the relativizing functions of postFordist electronic media
and the profusion of aesthetic and stylistic differences provoked by globalized entertainment apparatuses. Transnational corporations project flows of pre-fabricated American cultural products into other countries where they assume significances inflected by
the local-- that dialectic of culture and capital which reproduces global subjects. But of
course its never as simple as that. Debates about the effects of this process continue,
notably in efforts to assess whether the consumption of commodified art works allow
opportunities for resistance. Do proactive guerilla consumers domesticate a given cultural products meanings? Are we simply dupes? Griffiths efforts to shape audience reception indicates he might say yes to the last question. More importantly, at the level of
aesthetic production Broken Blossoms unintentionally explodes Brooks divided brow.
Aiming high even as he drew from the front and below, Griffith ended up toward the
middle.
Conclusion: What About Imperialism?

I began this paper with the notion that Broken Blossoms, a kind of modernist text,
might agree with Frederic Jamesons contention that the traces of imperialism are constitutive of modernism and can be found at the level of form. I suggested that Griffiths
use of soft-focus served to Orientalize the films initial setting, a strategy which complicates its other use-- to soften and illuminate Gishs tear-glossed face. Still, given the
prevalent trope of the Orient as essentially feminine, soft-focus dual purpose doesnt
inflict too much damage. I pointed to Barthelmess and Griffiths jaunts down the streets

of Los Angeles Chinatown, trips which fed both mens work. Griffith, ever the voyeur,
envisioned a locale charged with an otherized atmosphere similar to the one he encountered in southern California. In addition, the juxtaposition of blurry sampans and an exotic marketplace with the foggy underclass core of Londons colonial metropole indicates-- through its compression of space-- a panoptic, imperial gaze. Then too, though
now weve crossed the rubicon between form and content, we might look to Cheng
Huan in his role as a missionary on an imperialist, if quixotic, pursuit. As distinct from
The Chink and the Child, where he is simply a drifter with vaguely poetic tendencies, in
Broken Blossoms Cheng Huan leaves China to colonize the barbarous Anglo-Saxons
(i.e. instill in them Buddhist/Chinese values). Griffith seems to argue that despite the inevitability of Cheng Huans failure, London has already been colonized insofar as Chinatown functions as an outpost pocketed with enclaves of hybridized Chinese-British
culture such as the opium den. Certainly Chinatown is a locus of cross-cultural contact,
a third space where figures of illegitimate interracial desire-- Evil Eye staring hard at
poor Lucy, languid white women reclining on cushions, obscured by smoke-- flourish. All
of these perspectives gesture toward traces of imperialism in Broken Blossoms, yet I
am most struck by Griffiths desire to build his own aesthetic empire, one that spanned
from kitsch, low culture origins to the frontiers of the avant-garde and the uplands of
high culture. His efforts involved translating the popular into the language of elite artistry,
a task akin to the duty the narrator of Burkes story imposes, less than hopefully, on
himself. In our bald speech, he writes, the story must, unhappily, lose its essential fragrance, that quality that will lift an affair of squalor into the loftier spheres of passion and
imagination, beauty and sorrow. It will sound unconvincing, a little... you know... the kind
of thing that is best forgotten (1).
For a fuller discussion, see alsoDudley Andrew, Broken Blossoms: The Art and the
Eros of a Perverse Text. Quarterly Review of Film Studies. Winter 1981.
For a fuller discussion of Naturalism, see The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism. Donald Pizer, ed.
Cultural forms are cyclical. Witness the varied career of minstrelsy: conceived as a
lumpen entertainment in the ante-bellum north, blackface performance gradually
lurched into degraded and racist grotesqueries only to be reinvoked and rearticulated by
artists from Elvis to Spike Lee.
See The Sword Became a Flashing Vision in Ronald Reagan, The Movie. Michael
Rogin.
New York Times. May 16, 1919.
Variety.
See America Film Melodrama: Griffith, Vidor, Minnelli. Princeton: Princeton UP. 1989.
See Gender and Jim Crow, Glenda Gilmore. Ronald Reagan, the Movie. Michael Rogin. The Mind That Burns in Each Body: Women, Rape, and Racial Violence.
For a fuller discussion with links to nationalism, see Anne Knutson, The Enemy Imaged: Visual Configurations of Race and Ethnicity in World War I Propaganda Posters
in Race and the Production of Modern American Nationalism, Reynolds Scott-Childress,
ed.
See No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture,
1880-1920, especially Chapter 3.

On Henry Fords ambivalence on this matter see Robert McElvaine, The Great Depression: America, 1929-1941.
For a fuller discussion, see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes.
The idea that Griffith, the son of a Confederate secessionist, should be influenced by
the self-described Photo-Secessionists, pleases me greatly.
Though, it should be noted, despite questionable claims of its knowledge enhancing
effects, the Internet, given the fact that a far larger number of people in the United
States dont own a computer than do, has benefited relatively few.
Race and the Production of Modern American Nationalism, Reynolds Scott-

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