Abstract

The origins of D. W. Griffith’s 1921/22 film Orphans of the Storm can be traced through a popular French melodrama Les Deux Orphelines (1874), its performance in translation on the British and American stage, and several earlier film versions. This article charts the ways in which the melodrama was changed and adapted over time and demonstrates Griffith’s indebtedness to nineteenth-century theatrical practices

Highlights

  • It is apparent that some makers of these early films came from a theatrical background and brought with them into the new motion picture profession staging praxis, acting techniques, stage solutions to questions of illusion, musical accompaniment, and the theatrical repertoire itself

  • Griffith’s 1921 silent film Orphans of the Storm[2] is perhaps the better known of the numerous twentieth-century adaptations

  • The Library in effect said, well, it’s not an object; it’s not literature; the closest thing to a motion picture is a photograph, but a photograph is preserved on glass or metal or cardboard and is only readable when we look at the positive image, not a negative, so what we ask of those who seek copyright is that they submit a readable positive image of this film – a positive image transferred to a paper strip

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Summary

Introduction

This imbalance, in time, left Griffith with some immediate problems: how to cast and characterise the roles of Henriette and Louise: how to make the two sisters – or differently – compelling to cinema audiences. Many will know the iteration of this play through Griffith’s Orphans of the Storm but may not be as familiar with the original French melodrama nor either of the two principal English stage versions.

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