In 1919 and 1920, in the midst of an epochal boom of urbanization, D. W. Griffith filmed “Way Down East,” a pastoral melodrama set in a nostalgic small-town and rural America, which I discuss in the clip below. The director, born in 1875 in Kentucky, had already made quite clear his notion of the squalor and decadence of city life (as in “Broken Blossoms”). What’s equally clear is that city life was visually uninspiring to him. Griffith, who was the first to develop the cinema as an epic art, was also, in effect, an American Impressionist who used the camera to capture the natural landscape. One of the two main visual tropes I identify with Griffith is the wind in the leaves, of which there’s plenty in “Way Down East.” Like the French Impressionists, Griffith was also devoted to portraiture, or the inner landscape. Though he didn’t literally invent the close-up, he developed it as a crucial aspect of cinematic grammar, and, artistically, conjured from it an extraordinary range and depth of emotion—not least because of his great actress, Lillian Gish, whose face is the center of this movie.
She wrote a terrific autobiography, “The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me” (quoted at EyeWitness to History), in which she describes the rigors of this shoot—in particular, those she and the crew faced when shooting the climactic ice-floe scene:
Griffith’s Homeric artistry and his painterly insight—his view of the conflict between nature’s horrors (those of a blizzard and those found in the hearts of predators) and its glories (the peaceful landscape and the heart of true virtue)—come to full flower in “Way Down East.”