Lillian Gish in Way Down East (1920, D.W. Griffith)
We call her “Anna” - we might have called her “Woman” - for is not hers the story…
Lillian Gish in The Scarlet Letter (1926, dir. Victor Sjöström)
She had wandered, without rule or guidance, into a moral wilderness. Her intellect and heart had their home, as it were, in desert places, where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in his woods. The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers - stern and wild ones - and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.
-Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
The stand-off: Robert Mitchum & Lillian Gish in Night of the Hunter (1955, dir. Charles Laughton)
“I’ve never been in style, so I can never go out of style.”
-Lillian Gish
Lillian Gish & Dorothy Gish in An Unseen Enemy (1912, dir. D.W. Griffith)
(via)
Lillian Gish in The Scarlet Letter (1926, dir. Victor Sjöström)
“Thus the young and pure would be taught to look at her, with the scarlet letter flaming on her breast,—at her, the child of honorable parents,—at her, the mother of a babe, that would hereafter be a woman, —at her, who had once been innocent, —as the figure, the body, the reality of sin.”
-The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
![Lillian Gish as “The Eternal Mother” & The Fates in Intolerance (1916, dir. D.W. Griffith) (via Museum of Modern Art Film & Media Collection exhibition catalog)
Her hand on the cradle of humanity—eternally rocking.
“I often heard [D.W. Griffith] say that he would rather have written one page of Leaves of Grass than to have made all the movies for which he received world acclaim.
It is said that some twelve to fifteen years before [filming Intolerance], Griffith was walking with Wilfred Lucas, when they were both working in a road show, when Lucas caught sight of a woman rocking a cradle, and reminded Griffith of Walt Whitman’s poem from Leaves of Grass: ‘Out of the cradle endlessly rocking’ & ‘Endlessly rocks the cradle/ Uniter of Here and Hereafter.’
…We went back to the studio and did some shots of Lillian Gish rocking a cradle, all to the tune of Walt Whitman’s poetry, which Griffith recited with great feeling and surprisingly good delivery, considering how outstandingly lousy he was as an actor. It must have been one of his good days.
Griffith placed the symbolic figures of the Three Fates behind Lillian Gish. Upon hearing the sound of the spinning wheel and the creak of the Fates’ shears as they cut the thread of life, Griffith exclaimed: “Gahhd! If we could only get that sound!”
-excerpted from Karl Brown’s Adventures With D. W. Griffith (1973)](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lbldnubOYL1qzdvhio1_r1_500.jpg)
Lillian Gish as “The Eternal Mother” & The Fates in Intolerance (1916, dir. D.W. Griffith) (via Museum of Modern Art Film & Media Collection exhibition catalog)
Her hand on the cradle of humanity—eternally rocking.
“I often heard [D.W. Griffith] say that he would rather have written one page of Leaves of Grass than to have made all the movies for which he received world acclaim.
It is said that some twelve to fifteen years before [filming Intolerance], Griffith was walking with Wilfred Lucas, when they were both working in a road show, when Lucas caught sight of a woman rocking a cradle, and reminded Griffith of Walt Whitman’s poem from Leaves of Grass: ‘Out of the cradle endlessly rocking’ & ‘Endlessly rocks the cradle/ Uniter of Here and Hereafter.’
…We went back to the studio and did some shots of Lillian Gish rocking a cradle, all to the tune of Walt Whitman’s poetry, which Griffith recited with great feeling and surprisingly good delivery, considering how outstandingly lousy he was as an actor. It must have been one of his good days.
Griffith placed the symbolic figures of the Three Fates behind Lillian Gish. Upon hearing the sound of the spinning wheel and the creak of the Fates’ shears as they cut the thread of life, Griffith exclaimed: “Gahhd! If we could only get that sound!”
-excerpted from Karl Brown’s Adventures With D. W. Griffith (1973)
Lillian Gish in The Scarlet Letter (1926, dir. Victor Sjöström)
Lillian Gish, 1934. Photographer: Edward Steichen
“I was never young. And if you were never young, how can you ever feel old?”
Lillian Gish in The Lily and the Rose (1915, dir. Paul Powell) (via)
