Programme notes CH 01 — The Silent Signal
Orphans of the Storm
Two foster sisters, one of them blind, are separated on their first day in Paris and find each other again on the eve of the Terror.
Griffith's last great spectacle takes an 1874 stage weepie and drops it into the French Revolution, with a printed warning at the head about Bolshevism in case 1921 missed the point. The Gish sisters carry it. Lillian is Henriette, abducted the day they arrive; Dorothy is Louise, blind, kept by a family of beggars and sent singing in the streets. Watch Henriette, shut in a room above the street, hear that voice below and fail to reach the window in time. Griffith holds the scene longer than anyone else would have dared. The ride to the guillotine at the end is his last-minute rescue at its most shameless, and it still works.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- D. W. Griffith
- Photographed by
- Billy Bitzer
Every name is a door — each opens onto everything else that person made in the network.
The thread · every thread
Griffith's two histories with a lesson printed at the front: tolerance in 1916, a warning against Bolshevism in 1921. Both end on rescues cut to the second, and both put Lillian Gish at the centre of an age she cannot change.