Silents Are Golden.(silent movies)(Movie review)

The psychological subtlety of the silent cinema owes much to a complex visual grammar that D. W. Griffith employed to tell surprisingly old-fashioned stories. His "True Heart Susie" (Image Entertainment), from 1919, is the tale of a simple country girl (Lillian Gish) who makes sacrifices to advance the career of the boy next door (Robert Harron) but is thrown over for a shameless hussy. In a masterful sequence

in which Susie hides behind hedges and espies her beloved with the new girl, Griffith suggests the dislocation of her existence with jolting cuts between startlingly modulated angles. Yet the core of the scene, the closeups, are also the heart of Griffith's work. A hypnotic one, running thirty-five seconds, shows Susie when she sees her life's dreams definitively shattered. There, the framing of Gish's tremulous virtuosity reveals the source of Griffith's art in classical portraiture.

The early cinema's poetic style of emphatic and highly inflected gestures was ready-made for the grotesque, as seen in the great "Nosferatu," from 1922, by the German director F. W. Murnau (released by Kino, in an amazingly vibrant restoration). In this loose (and unauthorized) adaptation of Bram Stoker's "Dracula," a German real-estate agent travels to Transylvania to sell a house to Count Orlok, who turns out to be the title vampire (played by the freakish and utterly convincing Max Schreck). Murnau framed the spectral drama with a sober chronicle of an outbreak of ...