Production and Style
Unlike Griffith’s more extravagant earlier works like The Birth of a Nation or Intolerance, Broken Blossoms is a small-scale film that uses controlled studio environments to create a more intimate effect.
Griffith was known for his willingness to collaborate with his actors and on many occasions join them in research outings.
The visual style of Broken Blossoms emphasises the seedy Limehouse streets with their dark shadows, drug addicts and drunkards, contrasting them with the beauty of Cheng and Lucy’s innocent attachment as expressed by Cheng’s decorative apartment. Conversely, the Burrows' bare cell reeks of oppression and hostility. Film critic and historian Richard Schickel goes so far as to credit this gritty realism with inspiring “the likes of Pabst, Stiller, von Sternberg, and others, re-emerging in the United States in the sound era, in the genre identified as Film Noir".
Griffith was unsure of his final product and took several months to complete the editing saying “I can’t look at the damn thing; it depresses me so.”
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—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“The difference between style and taste is never easy to define, but style tends to be centered on the social, and taste upon the individual. Style then works along axes of similarity to identify group membership, to relate to the social order; taste works within style to differentiate and construct the individual. Style speaks about social factors such as class, age, and other more flexible, less definable social formations; taste talks of the individual inflection of the social.”
—John Fiske (b. 1939)