Programme notes CH 01 — The Silent Signal
Way Down East
A country girl tricked into a false marriage carries the secret to a New England farm, and the winter finds it out.
Griffith bought a creaking stage melodrama for more than most pictures cost to make, then filmed it as though nothing in it were old. Lillian Gish plays Anna Moore through every station of the form: the sham wedding, the dead baby she baptises herself, the boarding house that learns her history. What lifts it is weather. The last reel was shot in a real blizzard and on a real river breaking up, and the danger shows. Watch Gish on the ice floe, face down and unconscious, one hand and a rope of hair trailing in the river as the floe turns towards the falls. It is the image the whole melodrama was built to reach.
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
Richard Barthelmess, a year apart, as the farm boy who does the decent thing. For Griffith he is the son who crosses the ice for a fallen woman; for Henry King, the son who carries the mail through a family of killers. Two pastorals, and in both the country is where the violence lives.