Free Flapper by Joshua Zeitz Page A

a reputation as the industry’s most daring and innovative practitioner of the new art of cinematography. He placed cameras on rolling dollies so that he could follow his actors as they moved, thereby eliminating the vast, black space between the lens and the stage that occupied the bottom third of frames in other early productions. He merged short cuts from different perspectives to achieve a sense of action, motion, and complexity. In 1908, he even went so far as to use forty different shots in a single ten-minute film.
    Almost single-handedly, he made the movies modern. His 1915 masterpiece, The Birth of a Nation , cost a record-breaking $60,000 toproduce and ran over three hours. 2 Filmgoers were enraptured by its intertwining plotlines, its colorful and detailed set designs, its intricate character development, and its dramatic historical reenactments. The climactic scene depicted hundreds of white Klansmen on horseback, galloping off to save white womanhood from the black rapists whose primitive fury was unleashed by emancipation and radical Reconstruction. It was bad history and suffused with the sort of Jim Crow mentality that pervaded American culture in those days. But because—not in spite—of that, the audiences loved it.
    If he was the industry’s leading trailblazer in those days, Griffith remained stubbornly backward in his social outlook. His films exalted the bygone world of the nineteenth century and scored the new urban-industrial order in which men found themselves wage slaves and women found their virtue compromised by the vice and corruption of the metropolis.
    Lillian Gish, a popular actress who starred in many of Griffith’s early masterpieces, believed the great director was fundamentally a solitary and forlorn figure who glorified Victorian femininity on-screen but was terrified of women in real life. His heroines weren’t the “buxom, voluptuous form popular with the Oriental’s mind,” she observed with a tactlessness common to the time, but delicate, ghostly images who were the “very essence of virginity.”
    Lillian and her sister, Dorothy Gish, were exactly the kind of leading ladies whom Griffith favored. Growing up in the Midwest, they had attended convent schools. Lillian had even thought of becoming a nun. On the set, they were closely chaperoned by their mother. There was little chance they would try to circumvent the director’s famously severe strictures against vice and intemperance.
    So as to avoid even the “taint of scandal,” Griffith forbade his women players to entertain men in their dressing rooms. 3 They faced dismissal if they developed blemishes on their skin, as such imperfections, Griffith claimed, were surely a mark of a debauched character. And they were subjected to endless sermons on the virtues of clean living, for “women aren’t meant for promiscuity,” he explained. “If you’re going to be promiscuous, you will end up with some disease.”
    So insistent was he on maintaining stringent standards of femininevirtue that Griffith forbade his on-screen characters to kiss. They could only embrace.
    Though he used African American actors to play the parts of slaves in The Birth of a Nation , when the script called for black characters to assault white women, the director used white actors in blackface. It simply wouldn’t do to have black men touching white women. Not in a D. W. Griffith production, anyway.
    Griffith placed his leading ladies in front of white sheets, which reflected back the powerful glow of strobe lights and created a kind of “hazy photography” that served, in his mind, as “a great beauty doctor.” 4 The frail, angelic women who received this treatment personified the director’s larger moral scheme. The movies were America’s new, national pulpit, and Griffith eagerly ascended that pulpit to preach the nineteenth-century virtues of self-ownership, independence, reticence, sacrifice, and asceticism.
    “It was all nonsense