Lillian Gish in Way Down East, D.W. Griffith, 1920
The MOMA restoration of this uncanny masterpiece is the first thing I popped in after I got Kino's new box of Griffith works. Just beautiful.
I'm thinking of writing something comparing the narrative strategies of Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma, Way Down East, and Rivette's La Religieuse. Could take a while…
Spectral images of early cinema, like this one, give me the chills – simple as that. Beautiful.
I just happened to read S.J. Perelman’s “The Road to Miltown, or Under the Spreading Atrophy.” Many of the pieces in it are re-reviews of silent films he loved as a kid and then re-viewed years later at the MoMA film archive. One of them was a takedown of “Way Down East”, which IIRC was titled “I’m Sorry I Made Me Cry.” Howlingly funny, as are all of the silent film pieces in the book.