Way Down East. 1920. USA. Directed by D. W. Griffith. Screenplay by Anthony Paul Kelly, Griffith, based on the play by Lottie Blair Parker. With Lillian Gish, Richard Barthelmess, Lowell Sherman, Burr McIntosh, Kate Bruce, Creighton Hale. World premiere of the new, digitized edition of MoMA’s definitive 1979 photochemical restoration. 145 min.
By 1920, D. W. Griffith’s pastoral vision was beginning to feel dated, and his decision to spend $175,000 on the rights to an 1890s stage melodrama seemed to confirm the worst suspicions about his taste. The material is frankly Victorian: a country girl (Lillian Gish) is deceived into a sham marriage by a society cad (Lowell Sherman), bears a child alone, loses it, and wanders into domestic service on a New England farm, where the squire’s son (Richard Barthelmess) falls in love with her without knowing her history. Griffith builds all of this slowly, intercutting the main story with rustic comedy that ranges from warm to broad, while Billy Bitzer’s camera registers the Connecticut landscape with a pastoral quietness that will be upended in the final reel.
That final reel is among the most extraordinary sequences in American silent cinema, as Gish is driven out into a blizzard and collapses on an ice floe drifting toward a waterfall. Griffith shot the rescue at three locations over weeks of winter weather, with Gish’s hand trailing in the freezing river take after take, and the physical risk is visible in the footage. Griffith’s highly sophisticated editing, with his nuanced variations in rhythm and perspective, was an immediate and lasting influence on Sergei Eisenstein and the Soviet montage directors.
This exceptional screening marks the premiere of MoMA’s new digitization of its own groundbreaking photochemical restoration of 1986. The original orchestral score, composed and compiled by William Frederick Peters and Louis Silvers under Griffith’s intimate supervision, has been re-created by musicologist Gillian Anderson under the sponsorship of the American Musicological Society, and will be performed by a 10-piece orchestra conducted by Anderson.
Way Down East Personnel
Violin I: Lauren Cauley
Violin II: Kiwon Nahm
Cello: Aminda Asher
Bass: Patrick Swoboda
Flute: Kimberly O’Hare
Clarinet: Chad Smith
Trumpet: Changhun Cha
Trombone: Timothy Robinson
Piano: Adam Rothenberg
Percussion: Joshua Mark Samuels
Gemini Music Productions
Neil Balm, Jonathan Haas, and Sean Statser