Deep Archive Finds in the Vein of America: Cult Guide

Dir: D.W. Griffith

Susie, a plain young country girl, secretly loves a neighbor boy, William. She believes in him and sacrifices much of her own happiness to promote his own ambitions, all without his knowledge. Eventually he rises to a position of success and sophistication, and Susie realizes that she has through her own efforts raised him to a level where he is inaccessible to her.

Dir: D.W. Griffith

A visual fragment from the archive: The thematic resonance of Her Condoned Sin perfectly mirrors the editorial trajectory of our deep dive.

The Biograph Company's reissue of D. W. Griffith's "Judith of Bethulia" (1914), misleadingly re-titled and expanded with previously deleted footage.

Dir: D.W. Griffith

Story of two brothers who go off to France to fight in World War I, the women who love them and an American expatriate living in France who rallies behind his former country.

Dir: D.W. Griffith

A visual fragment from the archive: The thematic resonance of The Girl Who Stayed at Home perfectly mirrors the editorial trajectory of our deep dive.

John Logan leaves his parents and sweetheart in bucolic Happy Valley to make his fortune in the city. Those he left behind become miserable and beleaguered in his absence, but after several years he returns, a wealthy man.

Dir: D.W. Griffith

A dramatic comparison between the mating habits of animals and the way humans choose their own partners.

Dir: D.W. Griffith

A visual fragment from the archive: The thematic resonance of A Romance of Happy Valley perfectly mirrors the editorial trajectory of our deep dive.

Jeannette Peret, daughter of a cigar-store owner, leaves her Greenwich Village home for France in hopes of finding there the love which eludes her at home. She becomes enamored of le Bebe, a giant of a vegetable peddler, but his unsophisticated ways disillusion her. Edward Livingston, a wealthy young man from home who had spurned Jeannette, now turns up and realizes the error of his ways. But he, too, has a great flaw, and only the outbreak of war , ironically, is able to lead Jeannette to a peaceful conclusion to her quest.

Dir: D.W. Griffith

A religious woman seeks to save her people from destruction by seducing and murdering the enemy leader, but her plans get complicated once she falls for him.

Dir: D.W. Griffith

A visual fragment from the archive: The thematic resonance of The Escape perfectly mirrors the editorial trajectory of our deep dive.

A re-edited version of the 'modern' story from Intolerance (1916).

Dir: D.W. Griffith

The Stoneman family finds its friendship with the Camerons affected by the Civil War, both fighting in opposite armies. The development of the war in their lives plays through to Lincoln's assassination and the birth of the Ku Klux Klan.

Dir: D.W. Griffith

An idealistic young American during World War I, itching to fight the Germans and not wanting to wait until the U. S. joined the war, journeys to Canada and enlists in the British army. He is sent for training to England, and then to the front in France, where he is wounded. Returned back to England to recuperate from his wounds, he falls in love with the daughter of an Australian minister.