Lady in the Dark: Iris Barry and the Art of Film

Lady in the Dark: Iris Barry and the Art of Film by Robert Sitton (Columbia University Press). 2014 475 pages.

This new book is a fascinating look at MoMa's first curate of its film department. It is also a fine testament to future New York Governor and U.S. Vice President Nelson Rockefeller.

Lillian is mentioned only twice.

On page 254, "When (pianist Arthur) Kleiner played the score for Broken Blossoms, one could almost hear Lillian Gish's cries for help as she floated on the ice." Of course, the famous ice flow scene is from Way Down East.

Lillian is also mentioned on page 270 and 271. Only page 271 appears in the index. The first mention is about Lillian's assistance in obtaining the D.W. Griffith collection for MoMa. For the 1940 Griffith retrospective at MoMa citing Mary Lea Bandy, "Neither Griffith nor the Gish sisters attended."

Of The Birth of a Nation, Sitton writes, page 269, "Griffith fashioned a tale of the (Civil) War that advanced all the arguments some Southerners still hold dear: that carpetbaggers and scalawags exploited the South after the war, that the postwar federal government manipulated freed slaves to vote for quisling candidates, and that blacks posed a threat to civil order and southern womanhood answerable only to the Ku Klux Klan."

Overall an excellent book on Barry's important work at MoMa. No details on her work with Lillian.

James Patterson