{ "id": "epmq2ghzh5", "slug": "broken-blossoms", "title": "Broken Blossoms", "updated": "2026-11-01", "topic_path": [ { "id": "culture", "label": "Arts and culture", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture" }, { "id": "culture.performance", "label": "Screen and stage", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen", "label": "Film and television", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen.films", "label": "Films and standalone screen works", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen.films" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works", "label": "Individual films by title and year", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.early-silent", "label": "Early and silent cinema", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.early-silent" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.early-silent.silent-features", "label": "Silent feature films", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.early-silent.silent-features" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.early-silent.silent-features.yr-1914-1926", "label": "Released 1914 to 1926", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.early-silent.silent-features.yr-1914-1926" } ], "geo": [ { "id": "geo.us.t1800.culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.early-silent.silent-features", "label": "United States · 1800 to 1945: Silent feature films", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.us.t1800.culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.early-silent.silent-features", "path": [ { "id": "geo.us", "label": "United States", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.us" }, { "id": "geo.us.t1800", "label": "United States · 1800 to 1945", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.us.t1800" }, { "id": "geo.us.t1800.culture", "label": "Arts and culture", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.us.t1800.culture" }, { "id": "geo.us.t1800.culture.performance", "label": "Screen and stage", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.us.t1800.culture.performance" }, { "id": "geo.us.t1800.culture.performance.screen", "label": "Film and television", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.us.t1800.culture.performance.screen" }, { "id": "geo.us.t1800.culture.performance.screen.films", "label": "Films and standalone screen works", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.us.t1800.culture.performance.screen.films" }, { "id": "geo.us.t1800.culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works", "label": "Individual films by title and year", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.us.t1800.culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works" }, { "id": "geo.us.t1800.culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.early-silent", "label": "Early and silent cinema", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.us.t1800.culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.early-silent" }, { "id": "geo.us.t1800.culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.early-silent.silent-features", "label": "Silent feature films", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.us.t1800.culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.early-silent.silent-features" } ] } ], "excerpt": "Broken Blossoms (1919), also The Yellow Man and the Girl, is D.W. Griffith's silent drama adapted from Thomas Burke's Limehouse Nights, starring Lillian Gish, Richard Barthelmess, and Donald Crisp; his first United Artists release and a 1989 National Film Registry selection.", "snippet": "Broken Blossoms (1919), also The Yellow Man and the Girl, is D.W. Griffith's silent drama adapted from Thomas Burke's Limehouse Nights, starring Lillian Gish, Richard Barthelmess, and Donald Crisp; his first United Artists release and a 1989 National Film Registry selection.", "node": "culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.early-silent.silent-features.yr-1914-1926", "markdown": "# Broken Blossoms\n\n**Broken Blossoms** (full on-screen title *Broken Blossoms OR The Yellow Man and the Girl*) is a 1919 American silent drama directed, written, and produced by [D. W. Griffith](https://www.edgepedia.org/d-w-griffith), adapted from Thomas Burke's short story \"The Chink and the Child\" in his 1916 collection *Limehouse Nights*. It stars [Lillian Gish](https://www.edgepedia.org/lillian-gish) as Lucy, an abused London girl, Richard Barthelmess as Cheng Huan, a Chinese immigrant, and [Donald Crisp](https://www.edgepedia.org/donald-crisp) as her boxer father Battling Burrows.[1](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/18062-BROKEN-BLOSSOMS?cxt=filmography) • [2](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Broken_Blossoms) Made on a modest budget in eighteen days, it became a major critical and commercial success and was Griffith's first film released through United Artists, the company he co-founded in 1919.[3](https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_3465_300062291.pdf)\n\n| Key fact | Detail |\n|---|---|\n| Release | Opened the D. W. Griffith Repertory Season at the George M. Cohan Theatre, New York, on 13 May 1919; national release 20 October 1919[1](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/18062-BROKEN-BLOSSOMS?cxt=filmography) |\n| Source | \"The Chink and the Child,\" from Thomas Burke's *Limehouse Nights* (1916); working title was the story's title[1](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/18062-BROKEN-BLOSSOMS?cxt=filmography) |\n| Principal cast | Lillian Gish (Lucy), Richard Barthelmess (Cheng Huan, the \"Yellow Man\"), Donald Crisp (Battling Burrows)[4](https://www.encyclopedia.com/movies/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/broken-blossoms) |\n| Key crew | Photography G. W. Bitzer; special effects Hendrick Sartov; technical advisor Moon Kwan; music arranged by Louis F. Gottschalk and Griffith[3](https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_3465_300062291.pdf) |\n| Production | Shot entirely in the studio in 18 days, with no retakes and only 200 feet of printed stock left unused[5](https://lib.zu.edu.pk/ebookdata/Media%20Sciences/A%20History%20of%20Narrative%20Film.pdf) |\n| Cost and earnings | Cost $88,000; Griffith paid Adolph Zukor $250,000 to free it for United Artists; profit exceeded $700,000 by 1934[3](https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_3465_300062291.pdf) |\n| Preservation | Selected in 1989 for the first class of the Library of Congress National Film Registry[2](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Broken_Blossoms) |\n\n## Spoilers\n\n### Plot\n\nLimehouse, London, in the present day of 1919's audiences. Cheng Huan (Richard Barthelmess) arrives from China intending to spread the Buddha's gentle gospel among the \"tangled shrubbery\" of the Occident. The West disappoints him. He settles into a small curio shop with a shrine, smokes opium, and drifts through the district in a blue-tinted haze, a holy man gone to seed among pawnshops and sailors.\n\nLucy (Lillian Gish) is the daughter of Battling Burrows (Donald Crisp), a champion prizefighter who uses his fists in the ring and at home. When he loses a match, he comes home drunk and beats her. Her mother is long gone; the girl lives in terror, and the film shows the neighborhood as a deathtrap for women. One beating sends her fleeing into the streets. She collapses near Cheng Huan's shop. He carries her in, hides her upstairs, and tends her like something sacred: flowers, silk, a bed, the first kindness of her life. He never touches her. The film is careful about that, and its whole love story lives in glances and distance.\n\nBurrows, egged on by a jealous woman of the district named Evil Eye, begins hunting for his daughter. **The scene everyone remembers is the closet.** Lucy, hearing her father come for her, locks herself in a tiny closet. He attacks the door with an axe, splinters flying, and Griffith shoots much of it from inside the closet, cramped and claustrophobic, with Lucy whirling and spinning in terror with nowhere to go. To keep from crying, she forces her lips into a smile with her fingers, the gesture that became Gish's signature for the rest of her life. Gish improvised the tortured movements; her screams were reportedly so real that neighbors knocked on the studio door asking if everything was all right. Griffith, stunned, said, \"My God, why didn't you warn me you were going to do that?\" The film intercuts Cheng Huan at his shop, writhing on the floor clutching a torn piece of Lucy's silk, reaching for a gun, while Burrows breaks through the door, drags Lucy out, throws her on the bed, and beats her to death with the handle of his whip, the iris closing on the final blows.\n\nCheng Huan follows too late. He finds Burrows in his dressing room and shoots him, then carries Lucy's body back to his shop. Beside his shrine, with a temple bell sounding for the last time, he takes his own life with a knife, so the two gentle souls the world was too coarse for are at least reunited in death.\n\n### Characters\n\nCheng Huan (Richard Barthelmess) is a Chinese idealist played by a white actor in yellowface makeup, the film's standing wound. He begins as a missionary of peace, decays into an opium dreamer, and ends as an avenger; Barthelmess plays the last stretch wordless and devastated.\n\nLucy Burrows (Lillian Gish) is a girl of fifteen on the title card, though Gish, then 23, plays her younger, a child-woman performing courage she does not have. Her finger-forced smile, repeated four times through the film, is one of the most recognizable images in film history.\n\nBattling Burrows (Donald Crisp) is her father, a brute with no shading at all, a wall of shoulders and spite. Crisp shot his scenes at night because he was directing another film during the day.\n\n### Interpretations and controversies\n\nThe film is often read, and sometimes dismissed, as Griffith's apology for [The Birth of a Nation](https://www.edgepedia.org/the-birth-of-a-nation) and its celebration of the [Ku Klux Klan](https://www.edgepedia.org/ku-klux-klan), a plea for racial tolerance made four years after that film's infamy. The plea is real, and Roger Ebert credits it with helping nudge a xenophobic nation toward tolerance, but it is delivered through a caricature: the gentle Chinese saint is still a white actor in yellowface, and the intertitles traffic in the casual racism of 1919. Scholars have also analyzed the closet sequence as a cinematic equivalent of rape, its claustrophobic compositions putting the audience inside Lucy's terror. [Child abuse](https://www.edgepedia.org/child-abuse) was nearly taboo on the silent screen, and Griffith was one of the few filmmakers to put it there.\n\n### Sequels, prequels, and universe\n\nA British company attempted a remake in 1936 using Griffith's screenplay; it was virtually ignored on release.\n\n## Production\n\nGriffith began production in November 1918, between *The Greatest Thing in Life* and *The Girl Who Stayed at Home*. He withdrew the picture from his program of shorter features to release it as one of what he called his \"specials\" or \"big pictures,\" despite uncertainty over whether programmers or expensive productions were the better business.[3](https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_3465_300062291.pdf) [Mary Pickford](https://www.edgepedia.org/mary-pickford) had recommended Burke's story to him.[6](https://www.tcm.com/articles/157070/broken-blossoms)\n\nThe film was made quickly and cheaply. According to the film historian David Cook's account, drawing on Lillian Gish's recollections, Griffith shot it entirely in the studio in eighteen days on so rigorous a schedule that there were no retakes and only 200 feet of printed stock went unused, against a normal printed-to-used ratio of about 15 to 1 in 1919.[5](https://lib.zu.edu.pk/ebookdata/Media%20Sciences/A%20History%20of%20Narrative%20Film.pdf) Gish, born in 1896, was 23 during production and protested that she was too old and too tall to play a child; the film presents her as a 15-year-old (12 in Burke's story). She prepared by studying children in orphanages and devised Lucy's most famous gesture herself: when her father orders her to smile, she pushes the corners of her mouth up with two fingers.[6](https://www.tcm.com/articles/157070/broken-blossoms) • [1](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/18062-BROKEN-BLOSSOMS?cxt=filmography) Donald Crisp, simultaneously working on another studio's film, could shoot only after hours and on weekends.[6](https://www.tcm.com/articles/157070/broken-blossoms)\n\nGriffith had hoped to shoot in London's Limehouse district but settled for a Hollywood sound stage.[6](https://www.tcm.com/articles/157070/broken-blossoms) The film's ambiance derived from a series of watercolors of Limehouse by the English artist George Baker, while the photography and lighting were, in Cook's phrase, distinctly Continental, owing much to Bitzer's recently acquired assistant Hendrik Sartov, a specialist in mood lighting and soft-focus work.[5](https://lib.zu.edu.pk/ebookdata/Media%20Sciences/A%20History%20of%20Narrative%20Film.pdf) Moon Kwan served as technical advisor; the Los Angeles Times reports that Griffith also hired James B. Leong as consultants for cultural authenticity, a collaboration later dramatized in the 2024 play *Unbroken Blossoms*.[3](https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_3465_300062291.pdf) • [7](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2024-07-03/d-w-griffith-racism-broken-blossoms-play-east-west-players)\n\n## Release and business\n\nIn January 1919 Griffith joined [Douglas Fairbanks](https://www.edgepedia.org/douglas-fairbanks), Mary Pickford, and Charles Chaplin in forming the United Artists Corporation. None of the partners except Fairbanks was immediately free to produce, and Griffith needed working capital, signing a three-picture contract with First National on January 21, 1919. He opened his own Repertory Season in New York in May 1919 with *Broken Blossoms*, followed by *The Fall of Babylon*, a revised *Hearts of the World*, and *The Mother and the Law*; the season added prestige but little money. After settling with [Adolph Zukor](https://www.edgepedia.org/adolph-zukor), who had advanced money for the film, Griffith consented to [United Artists](https://www.edgepedia.org/united-artists) handling general distribution, making *Broken Blossoms* his first contribution to the new company in the fall of 1919.[3](https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_3465_300062291.pdf) AFI Silver describes it as the company's second-ever release, after Fairbanks's *His Majesty, the American*.[8](https://silver.afi.com/movies/detail/0100002403/)\n\nThe financing was contentious. Production costs totaled $88,000, but Griffith had to pay Zukor $250,000 to free the film for United Artists distribution; the TCM account states that Zukor so disliked the finished film that Griffith repaid his advance to take the film back. Griffith sold tickets in New York for three dollars each, an extremely high price at the time.[3](https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_3465_300062291.pdf) • [6](https://www.tcm.com/articles/157070/broken-blossoms) The film nonetheless earned a profit of over $700,000 by 1934 by MoMA's account; Cook's history puts the cost at $90,000 and the take at nearly $1 million.[3](https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_3465_300062291.pdf) • [5](https://lib.zu.edu.pk/ebookdata/Media%20Sciences/A%20History%20of%20Narrative%20Film.pdf)\n\nThe New York presentation included a staged prologue, *The Dance of Life and Death*, copyrighted by Griffith in 1919 as \"a dance play in one act.\" After the New York run the film played in Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, and possibly other cities before its national release on 20 October 1919.[1](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/18062-BROKEN-BLOSSOMS?cxt=filmography)\n\n## Style\n\n*Broken Blossoms* is an intimate, three-person melodrama, almost entirely contained within two small interior sets, in deliberate contrast to the epics *The Birth of a Nation* (1915) and *Intolerance* (1916).[9](https://silentfilmcalendar.org/reviews/broken-blossoms-1919/) MoMA notes that Griffith conceived it as an \"art film\" and patented a \"gel-lighting\" system designed to project colored lights onto the film during first-run screenings; the museum's restoration achieves these impressionistic effects with tints of amber, pink, blue, and yellow.[10](https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/8951) MoMA's catalog credits the film's chief contribution to film art as its poetic atmosphere: the rendition of London fogs, the lights and shadows, tinted stock in soft blues, oranges, and golds, and the soft-focus photography.[3](https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_3465_300062291.pdf)\n\nThe most famous sequence is the closet scene, in which Battling Burrows breaks down the door of the closet where Lucy hides from his violence. Griffith reportedly said to Gish afterward, \"My God, why didn't you warn me you were going to do that,\" startled by the visceral performance she produced.[6](https://www.tcm.com/articles/157070/broken-blossoms) Because cinematic convention of the day forbade physical contact between the actors, the love between Lucy and Cheng is conveyed through gestures and changes of expression rather than touch; Roger Ebert called it perhaps the first interracial love story in the movies, an idealized love with no touching.[11](https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-broken-blossoms-1919)\n\n## Reception and interpretation\n\nAmerican critical acclaim surpassed anything Griffith had previously received; the *New York Times* review of 1919 called the film \"a masterpiece in moving pictures\" and described spectators applauding and refusing to leave until Griffith appeared on stage.[3](https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_3465_300062291.pdf) • [12](https://etd.ohiolink.edu/acprod/odb_etd/ws/send_file/send?accession=toledo1197411493&disposition=inline) The film is often read in relation to *The Birth of a Nation*: Kino Lorber describes it as Griffith's response to critics of that film, an effort to clear himself of lingering charges of racism, and the Library of Congress essay by Ed Gonzalez notes that via its poetic intertitles Griffith addressed both the love between Lucy and Cheng and the critics who accused him of racism.[13](https://kinolorber.com/film/brokenblossoms) • [14](https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/broken_blossoms.pdf) The feminist scholar Julia Lesage, writing in *Jump Cut* in 1981, argued that Griffith wanted the film considered anti-racist but that it represses any understanding of the real mechanisms of racism.[15](https://pages.uoregon.edu/jlesage/Juliafolder/brokenblossoms.html)\n\n**Reception abroad was divided.** In Paris, where the film opened in the autumn of 1921, intellectual film critics praised it enthusiastically, but many ordinary Parisians felt fooled by what they considered false advertising; some were offended by the domestic violence, and exhibitors' arbitrary cuts, made out of fear of censorship, disrupted the story for audiences.[16](https://digital.lib.washington.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/523c9eeb-e156-4b93-bdd9-9f70eac98108/content) In China, where the film was screened in 1925 under a title borrowed from a classical poem about a broken flower weeping under water, reception was mixed: some viewers applauded the sympathetic Chinese character capable of pure love, while critics such as He Xinleng, editor of the *Shenbao* newspaper supplement, objected that the film uttered a racial slur, citing the unhealthy, puppet-like \"white-facing-yellow\" protagonist, the gambling and opium scenes, and the indiscriminate mixing of Chinese, Indian, and Malaysian figures.[17](https://pure.eur.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/190120640/THE_Anxiety_of_Authenticity_THE_Historical_Reception_of_BrokenBlossoms_1919_Shanghai_Express_1932_and_The_Good_Earth_1937_in_China.pdf)\n\nModern scholarship holds both judgments together. Qijun Han's 2021 study in the *Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television* concludes that despite falling into racializing practices, foremost the casting of a Caucasian man in yellowface makeup, Griffith created perhaps one of the first major and sympathetic Chinese images in Hollywood cinema, breaking from the prevailing yellow-peril narrative.[17](https://pure.eur.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/190120640/THE_Anxiety_of_Authenticity_THE_Historical_Reception_of_BrokenBlossoms_1919_Shanghai_Express_1932_and_The_Good_Earth_1937_in_China.pdf) A 2025 survey in the same decolonizing pedagogy vein describes the film as noted for anti-racist tendencies while still operating within an Orientalist paradigm that exoticizes and marginalizes its subject.[18](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25741136.2025.2600057)\n\n## Legacy\n\nThe film's influence reached beyond Hollywood. MoMA's catalog states that it marked a distinct stage in the development of the American film, that it profoundly affected the French critic Louis Delluc and his disciples, and that it cannot have been without influence in Germany.[19](https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_2877_300062291.pdf) In 1989 the Library of Congress selected it for the first class of the [National Film Registry](https://www.edgepedia.org/national-film-registry).[2](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Broken_Blossoms) The film remains extant and in circulation; the Library of Congress's American Silent Feature Film Survival Database lists it as surviving, and it has been restored and re-scored for home video, including a Kino Lorber edition remastered from a 35mm print with color tints and a new score by Joseph Turrin.[1](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/18062-BROKEN-BLOSSOMS?cxt=filmography) • [13](https://kinolorber.com/film/brokenblossoms)\n\n## References\n\n1. [Broken Blossoms (1919), AFI Catalog of Feature Films](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/18062-BROKEN-BLOSSOMS?cxt=filmography)\n2. [Broken Blossoms (1919), Wikisource transcription](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Broken_Blossoms)\n3. [Iris Barry and Charles Silver, D. W. Griffith: American Film Master, MoMA catalogue](https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_3465_300062291.pdf)\n4. [Broken Blossoms, Encyclopedia.com (International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers)](https://www.encyclopedia.com/movies/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/broken-blossoms)\n5. [David Cook, A History of Narrative Film, Fifth Edition](https://lib.zu.edu.pk/ebookdata/Media%20Sciences/A%20History%20of%20Narrative%20Film.pdf)\n6. [Felicia Feaster, Broken Blossoms, Turner Classic Movies](https://www.tcm.com/articles/157070/broken-blossoms)\n7. [Ashley Lee, D.W. Griffith stoked racism with 'Birth of a Nation.' A playwright imagines what happened next, Los Angeles Times, July 3, 2024](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2024-07-03/d-w-griffith-racism-broken-blossoms-play-east-west-players)\n8. [Broken Blossoms (1919), AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center](https://silver.afi.com/movies/detail/0100002403/)\n9. [Broken Blossoms (1919) review, Silent Film Calendar](https://silentfilmcalendar.org/reviews/broken-blossoms-1919/)\n10. [Broken Blossoms. 1919. Directed by D.W. Griffith, MoMA](https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/8951)\n11. [Roger Ebert, Broken Blossoms (1919), January 23, 2000](https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-broken-blossoms-1919)\n12. [New York Times review of Broken Blossoms, quoted in Qian Zhang, Ohio State/Toledo dissertation](https://etd.ohiolink.edu/acprod/odb_etd/ws/send_file/send?accession=toledo1197411493&disposition=inline)\n13. [Broken Blossoms, Kino Lorber Theatrical](https://kinolorber.com/film/brokenblossoms)\n14. [Ed Gonzalez, film essay for Broken Blossoms, National Film Preservation Board, Library of Congress](https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/broken_blossoms.pdf)\n15. [Julia Lesage, Artful Racism and Artful Rape in Broken Blossoms, Jump Cut no. 26 (1981)](https://pages.uoregon.edu/jlesage/Juliafolder/brokenblossoms.html)\n16. [Gender, Class and Cinephilia: Parisian Cinema Cultures, 1918-1925, University of Washington](https://digital.lib.washington.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/523c9eeb-e156-4b93-bdd9-9f70eac98108/content)\n17. [Qijun Han, The Anxiety of Authenticity: The Historical Reception of Broken Blossoms (1919), Shanghai Express (1932) and The Good Earth (1937) in China, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 41(2), 2021](https://pure.eur.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/190120640/THE_Anxiety_of_Authenticity_THE_Historical_Reception_of_BrokenBlossoms_1919_Shanghai_Express_1932_and_The_Good_Earth_1937_in_China.pdf)\n18. [Decolonising China on screen: curating cinemas of the Sinosphere for the university classroom, 2025](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25741136.2025.2600057)\n19. [D. W. Griffith, American Film Master, MoMA catalogue (earlier edition)](https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_2877_300062291.pdf)\n\n---\n*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Early and silent cinema › Silent feature films › Released 1914 to 1926*\n\n*Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*\n\n*Copyright 2026 EdgeChat AI, a subsidiary of Biostate AI.*\n\nLicense: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license\n", "same_as": [], "url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/broken-blossoms", "markdown_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/broken-blossoms.md", "license": { "name": "Edgepedia Community License 1.0", "url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license", "summary": "Free with credit, commercial use included. AI training is open to everyone. For other uses, organizations over USD 100M in revenue or 100M monthly users license separately.", "spdx": "LicenseRef-Edgepedia-Community-1.0" }, "credit": "\"Broken Blossoms\", Edgepedia (EdgeChat), https://www.edgepedia.org/broken-blossoms. Edgepedia Community License 1.0.", "credit_md": "\"[Broken Blossoms](https://www.edgepedia.org/broken-blossoms)\", Edgepedia (EdgeChat), [https://www.edgepedia.org/broken-blossoms](https://www.edgepedia.org/broken-blossoms). [Edgepedia Community License 1.0](https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license).", "credit_html": "\"Broken Blossoms\", Edgepedia (EdgeChat), https://www.edgepedia.org/broken-blossoms. Edgepedia Community License 1.0.", "speakable": "Broken Blossoms, also The Yellow Man and the Girl, is D.W." }