nourishing obscurity

And then one day things weren’t quite so fine
I fell in love with Lily
I asked my dad where Lily I could find
He said, ‘Son, now don’t be silly’

‘She’s been dead since 1929′
Oh, how I cried that night
If only I’d been born in Lily’s time
It would have been alright

- The Who, 1967

Don’t laugh but your humble blogger fell in love with Lillian Gish yesterday [these things can often last for days] and what was the first clip of her on Youtube?

Yup – the Who -sigh:

The only discrepancy, by the way was that she didn’t die in 1929 but actually went on to a late acting career in her final years, appearing in a film in 1987 and getting good reviews as well.

The It girl, Clara Bow was great, Louise Brooks was great in her self-centred way but Lillian Gish endures and the Who had it dead right. I’d imagine women wouldn’t be too impressed with our Lily’s little game but it sure is an effective strategy and she’d have most men on a string, eating out of her little hand:

Mythical Monkey says:

I’ve written about Lillian Gish before and I won’t reiterate it all here except to say that she was the best actress of the Silent Era and though she most often played shy, virginal victims, she was actually one tough cookie who took complete control of her career in the early ’20s and crafted some of the best movies of the age.

As screenwriter Frances Marion put it:

“She might look fragile, but physically and spiritually she was as fragile as a steel rod. Nobody could sway her from her self-appointed course. With a Botticelli face, she had the mind of a good Queen Bess, dictating her carefully thought-out policies and ruling justly, if firmly.”

This next film clip annoys me and though it was just a film, just fiction, the topic of fire and brimstone bigots masquerading as Christians really gets under my guard. I can’t bear the damage they do to what should be a compassionate faith, with a healing ministry attached. Why on earth would you want to box yourself up in a religion which nowhere asks you to come the stern, disdainful moralizer – it only requires you to set the personal example. Anyway, enough of the soapbox:

Well, all right, fair enough – that was a bit OTT and the scene about the bird was questionable but still … let’s press on.

In The Wind, to create the endless sandstorms that are central to the plot, Gish and director Victor Sjöström flew eight airplanes to the middle of the Mojave Desert and cranked their propellers up on high. Coupled with 120ºF temperatures that cooked metal surfaces and warped film stock, it was a pretty miserable experience.

One commenter, a woman, says:

Have you read her autobiography? You get plenty of examples of how tough she was. I mean, this woman was doing theater in London during the Blitz!

And lastly, the poor little innocent victim finds herself almost swept over a waterfall [it must have been hard going making these]. Once again, do you know of one man who wouldn’t have leaped over that ice to save her? We can see straight through her but still – all power to her tricks of the trade:

An obituary:

There are three reasons why this actress matters to this day.

First, she laid down the ground rules for movie acting.  The truth is, there isn’t an actress working today who doesn’t owe the way she presents herself to a motion-picture camera directly to Lillian Gish. Director D.W. Griffith may have developed the close-up, but it was Gish who figured out what to do with it, bringing a naturalism to screen behavior that stood in subtle contrast to the vampy histrionics of Theda Bara or the stagy simpering of Mary Pickford.

Second, she always knew exactly who she was. The heroines Gish portrayed were fluttery, waiflike creatures, assaulted by cruelties straight out of Dickens. However, the actress herself was sensible, gracious, and after her pure-hearted persona fell out of synch with the party-hearty 1920s, Gish blithely absented herself to the New York stage and occasional character parts in movies.  ”I’ve never been in style,” Gish once said, with her usual serene clarity, ”so I can’t go out of style.”

And finally, with her death, the early days of film become mere history.  What was once alive had now died with her.

Lillian Gish

Filed under: Music