The first of three one-reelers presented in the online edition of the 40th Pordenone Silent Film Festival under the headline "Vitagraph Japonisme," "The Love of Chrysanthemum." This one is very much in the tradition of the opera "Madame Butterfly," complete with an American abandoning, for another American, a Japanese girl, named here after a flower (chrysanthemum) instead of an insect (butterfly), who then commits seppuku, or harakiri.
It'd dated Orientalism with even the main Japanese characters being played obviously, and stiltedly, by Caucasians (an instance of closer camera positions by 1910 not always being beneficial) while some Asians seem to have been added as extras--not unlike, to bring up an unflattering comparison, how "The Birth of a Nation" (1915) segregated main parts for blackface and hired African Americans only as extras. The supposed setting in Japan, too, was obviously filmed at a studio--presumably Vitagraph's one in New York. Historically interesting, but it's derivative racism despite nominally being sympathetic to its tragic depiction of the racial "other," a crosscut away from the suicide to the white couple included. At least dialogue intertitles were rare at this point, so we're spared the offensive broken English of later productions.
It'd dated Orientalism with even the main Japanese characters being played obviously, and stiltedly, by Caucasians (an instance of closer camera positions by 1910 not always being beneficial) while some Asians seem to have been added as extras--not unlike, to bring up an unflattering comparison, how "The Birth of a Nation" (1915) segregated main parts for blackface and hired African Americans only as extras. The supposed setting in Japan, too, was obviously filmed at a studio--presumably Vitagraph's one in New York. Historically interesting, but it's derivative racism despite nominally being sympathetic to its tragic depiction of the racial "other," a crosscut away from the suicide to the white couple included. At least dialogue intertitles were rare at this point, so we're spared the offensive broken English of later productions.
