REFLEXIÓN BROKEN BLOSSOMS DE GRIFFITH

octubre 14, 2017

REFLEXIÓN BROKEN BLOSSOMS DE GRIFFITH

Hay algo extrañamente hipnótico en esta película, es muy extraña, pero no quieres dejar de verla. Digo extraño en el sentido de que la encuentro inusual y digo inusual en sentido de que me parece sombría, desde el planteamiento y desarrollo de la historia hasta el tipo de imágenes que se nos presentan y la atmósfera que se da con éstas la película es una montaña rusa de sensaciones.

Es muy tierna Lillian Gish en el papel de Lucy, su actuación brinda este efecto de melancolía y tragedia que pretende la película. Es sumamente dramático todo lo que ocurre, incluso me parece excesivo y es justo este exceso el que hace a la película extraña.

Los escenarios y la fotografía de las escenas las encuentro muy bellas, esta es la parte hipnótica, todo es muy armonioso visualmente.

Debo confesar que la caracterización de Richard Barthelmess como The yellow man la hallé hilarante y jocosa, aunque es interesantísimo darse cuenta de cómo se la ingeniaron los primeros directores cinematográficos para lograr ciertas características en los personajes.

Hay una escena muy memorable en la película, the closet scene, en donde Lucy se esconde de su padre enfadado y con un hacha en un closet, él comienza a golpear la puerta con el hacha hasta que la rompe, Lucy grita desesperada, su padre va por ella.

Qué escena tan familiar, ¿En dónde más se ha visto esto?

Es muy interesante, se dice que tanto Alfred Hitchcock como Stanley Kubrick se inspiraron en la escena para las películas Psicosis y El Resplandor.

Dejo un texto tal cual encontrado en una descripción del video de esta escena en youtube porque me parece muy interesante:

The famous "closet scene" from BROKEN BLOSSOMS (1919) became a benchmark for sheer terror in cinema, and its preeminence in that regard would not be seriously challenged for over forty years, until Hitchcock gave us PSYCHO. In the movie, Gish's father has dragged her character home and is preparing to horsewhip her to death. Terrified, she dives into the closet and locks the door against him, listening in raw terror to his angry ravings and then his battering down of the door with a hatchet, THE SHINING-style. Alone in the dark, the doomed young girl has plenty of time to contemplate what is about to happen to her. On the day it was to be shot, Griffith ran Gish ragged until 2 a.m., trying to get her into an exhausted state conducive to losing herself in the moment. What he didn't know was that she had been rehearsing the scene in private "almost without sleep" for three days and nights, striving to come up with the perfect pantomime for terror, some action or gesture that would pierce the audience like a knife in the heart: "I worked that out myself. I never told Griffith what I was going to do. You see, if I had told him, he'd have made me rehearse it over and over again; and that would have spoilt it. It had to be spontaneous, the hysterical terror of a child. Well, when I came to play the scene in front of the camera, I did it as I planned -- spinning and screaming terribly (I was a good screamer; Mr. Griffith used to encourage me to scream at the top of my voice). When we finished, Mr. Griffith was very pale." It remains, for all of the advances we've had in technology, an electrifying scene. "I have seen every actress of America and Europe during the last half-century," the famous actor Rudolph Schildkraut said at the time. "Lillian Gish's scene in the closet, where she is hiding in terror from her brutal father, is the finest work I have ever witnessed." Normally during a shoot, Griffith's highest praise after a scene was to murmur with soft content, "That is very fine." But on this night, after Lillian Gish had screamed for long minutes like a banshee and twirled around in the enclosed closet space like a feral animal, Griffith's response was "My God -- why didn't you warn me you were going to do that?" One suspects that he said this with a huge smile, for cameraman Billy Bitzer reports that, while Gish was immersed in her throes of terror, he snuck a glance over at Griffith and saw that he was "leaned forward in his directors chair, relishing every moment of it."[1]

Por cierto Lillian Gish tenía 26 años cuando hizo esta película y Richard Barthelmess tenía 24.