movements and gestures for his actors rather than
training their voices. The longer stories of such
feature-length films as The Birth of a Nation(1915),
Intolerance(1916), Hearts of the World(1918), and
Broken Blossoms(1919) gave the actors more screen
time and therefore more screen space in which to
develop their characters. Close-ups required them
to be more aware of the effect that their facial
expressions would have on the audience, and
actors’ faces increasingly became more important
than their bodies (although, in the silent comedies
of the 1920s, the full presence of the human body
was virtually essential for conveying humor).
Under Griffith’s guidance, Lillian Gish invented
the art of screen acting. Griffith encouraged her to
study the movements of ordinary people on the
street or in restaurants, to develop her physical
skills with regular exercise, and to tell stories
through her face and body. He urged her to watch
the reactions of movie audiences, saying, “If they’re
held by what you’re doing, you’ve succeeded as an
actress.”^7 Gish’s performance in Broken Blossoms
(1919) was the first great film performance by an
actor. Set in the Limehouse (or Chinatown) section
of London, the movie presents a very stylized fable
about the love of an older Chinese merchant, Cheng
Huan (Richard Barthelmess), for an English ado-
lescent, Lucy Burrows (Gish). Lucy’s racist father,
the boxer Battling Burrows (Donald Crisp), beats
her for the slightest transgression. Enraged by her
friendship with the merchant, Burrows drags her
home, and when Lucy hides in a tiny closet, he
breaks down the door and beats her so savagely
that she dies soon after.
The interaction of narrative, acting, extremely
confined cinematic space, and exploitation of the
audience’s fears gives this scene its beauty, power,
and repulsiveness. Seen from various angles within
the closet, which fills the screen, Lucy clearly can-
not escape. Hysterical with fear, she finally curls up
as her father breaks through the door. At the end,
she dies in her bed, forcing the smile that has char-
acterized her throughout the film. Terror and pity
produce the cathartic realization within the viewer
that Lucy’s death, under these wretched circum-
stances, is truly a release.
In creating this scene, Gish invoked a span of
emotions that no movie audience had seen before
and few have seen since. Her performance illustrates
the qualities of great screen acting: appropriateness,
expressive coherence, inherent thoughtfulness/
emotionality, wholeness, and unity. Amazingly, the
performance resulted from Gish’s own instincts—her
sense of what was right for the climactic moment of
the story and the mise-en-scène in which it took
place—rather than from Griffith’s direction:The scene of the terrified child alone in the closet
could probably not be filmed today. To watch Lucy’s
hysteria was excruciating enough in a silent picture;
a sound track would have made it unbearable. When
we filmed it I played the scene with complete lack of
restraint, turning around and around like a tortured296 CHAPTER 7ACTING
(^7) Lillian Gish, with Ann Pinchot, Lillian Gish: The Movies,
Mr. Griffith, and Me(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall,
1969), pp. 97–101; quotation, p. 101. See also Jeanine Basinger,
Silent Stars(New York: Knopf, 1999).
Lillian Gish in Broken Blossoms Lillian Gish was
twenty-three when she played the young girl Lucy Burrows in
D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms(1919). It was, incredibly, her
sixty-fourth movie, and she gave one of her long career’s
most emotionally wrenching performances.