Broken Blossoms - An Unfinished Attempt at Understanding

DW Griffiths' Broken Blossoms has been rightly regarded as one of the pioneers of narrative cinema. Though shot in 1919, it has become a sort of guideline through which all of modern cinema comes back to time and time again. Notice the scene where the father hacks the door down with an axe to get at his daughter, Lucy - such a powerful scene was influential to Stanley Kubrick in his making of Stephen King's The Shining. This is also a key scene in the film itself as it powerfully demonstrates with each strike of the axe we see the torment of Lucy, played out by Lillian Gish, as she fears for her life and the striking of the axe through the door. Meanwhile as this is happening we cut away to Cheng Huan who is distraught to see that his room had been destroyed and what's more, they have taken away Lucy, who he had fallen in love with. Such is the interlinking of this plot that it can only serve to heighten the tension in a film that is already overwrought with suspense.

It is this interlinking of the plot that we get two seperate stories and how they mesh together as one. One can watch this film in almost the same way as they would read a book with the addition of tension, suspense, the cut back to another part of the story. Such as it is, this is the blueprint for those who make films. Although to modern day eyes this representation of cinema may be seen as somewhat theatrical, as according to Jean Luc Godard in one of his earliest criticisms in Cahiers du cinéma, it is nonetheless a feature or a guideline in what is the fundamental principles of cinema as to lighting, close ups etc.