DW Griffith at The White House in 1921
Credit: Bettmann
This year, a slew of major silent films celebrate their centenaries – reflecting, in 1921, a vigorous torrent of new productions coming through after the economic drain of the Spanish Flu and First World War. Chaplin’s evergreen The Kid was among these, as were the hit war epic The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and The Sheik, which made Rudolph Valentino an international sex symbol.
What none of these films boasted, though, was an experiment with sound, six years before The Jazz Singer changed the medium for good. The man to try it out was DW Griffith in his romantic drama Dream Street, which premiered on May 2 of that year. Indeed, his was the first voice New Yorkers would have heard: the main feature was preceded by a filmed introduction from Griffith, which he had recorded in a nearby studio using the early sound-on-film process Photokinema.
How do I select the movie I pick each week? It’s not particularly scientific, I look through what I can easily find – which is very easy in the silent era, since everything is old enough to be in the public domain at this point, provided that it wasn’t lost completely, like The Miracle Man, which had the biggest box office of 1919 but no longer exists – and pick something that seems interesting in some way. In the case of Broken Blossoms, I picked it entirely because of the man who made it, D. W. Griffith. It’s impossible to talk about the silent era without talking about Griffith, who was one of the major directors of the time. His films contributed to the way movies looked, and how movies still look - his use of close-ups is still a basic part of film grammar today, but was revolutionary at the time. But the problem with Griffith is that while he was technically brilliant, he also made Birth of a Nation, which was incredibly racist. Not just racist in a modern con