The American Sun & Wind Moving Picture Company

1918

1918 W e sat in the projection room, watching French, American , and German soldiers die, while on screen Mister Griffith, in a pith helmet, walked among them. Miss Gish and Billy Bitzer, Mister Griffith’s cameraman, sat behind me with my mother and father. Miss Gish’s skin was the fairest I had ever seen, and her almond eyes were even larger than my mother’s. Her auburn hair was braided and tied in a brown taffeta schoolgirl’s bow, and there was something in the hollows of her narrow cheeks that made her appear lost—as if, I thought, she were intending to play an orphan a lonely couple might choose to adopt as their ward. Below her blue wool frock coat, which she left unbuttoned, she wore a brown pin-check gingham dress. Mister Griffith sat to one side of me, my father to the other. Behind me, Miss Gish whispered to my mother that she had it on good authority—a distinguished French dramatist who was herself the mysterious woman allowed to visit Captain Dreyfus on Devil’s Island—that Chinese men were the best lovers because Chinese women were so difficult to arouse. Miss Gish told my mother that Mister Griffith insisted 1918 / 29 it be written into her contract, as well as the contract of her sister Dorothy, that in their films no man ever be allowed to kiss either of them upon the lips. Mister Griffith turned and, his hand upon my thigh for balance, and breathing Izzie’s sour mash whiskey into my face, he talked of rolling barrages, soul-sickening smells, and shell-scorched orchards, of having looked out from trenches across no–man’s–land at the desolation of nothingness. We watched a group of French soldiers dig a trench. On the screen, Mister Griffith mimed their digging motions, then stumbled into their dugout and emerged, hat in hand, and signaled “Cut!” to the cameraman. We laughed, but Mister Griffith declared that he was never too proud to show unedited footage. He spoke of air attacks on London by dirigibles, and described how, after a night raid, wherein a bomb had demolished a tram, the cries of the wounded rose from the street and soaked the air. We saw dead horses and a slender finger of stone that rose from the rubble of what had once been a cathedral. Mister Griffith appeared within the ruin, dressed in a tweed suit, a bow tie, and a tin hat. He smiled from the screen as if welcoming us to a picture palace. Promoters boast of having made motion pictures for which the settings and actors cost a million dollars, he said. But the settings of my new moving picture—the one for which I seek your collaboration—will cost untold sums. For I will use nothing less than the most expensive settings that have ever been utilized in the making of movies. With his left hand he gestured to Ben to change reels, while with his right hand he caressed my thigh, then let his hand fall between my legs, into the folds of my wedding dress. I pushed his hand away and grabbed my father’s arm. War’s hell, son, my father said. So’s this movie, Izzie said. Until this moment, Mister Griffith stated, we have merely seen the actual war. Now we will see its true drama. For I The American Sun & Wind Moving Picture Company / 30 am not, you see, interested in history alone, but in something more eternal—in the history of feelings! On the screen, an American soldier was dying. The American soldier wore blackface in the way white actors had worn blackface when playing Negroes in The Birth of a Nation. The Negro soldier has found himself in the same shell hole with a white Southern officer, Mister Griffith explained. When the officer was hit, it was the Negro soldier who rescued him and, in so doing, was himself mortally wounded. The officer was played by Bobby Harron, and though his face was splattered with mud, he looked very handsome. Bobby Harron put a canteen of water to the Negro soldier ’s lips, but the Negro pushed away the canteen, and sat up wide-eyed. Mammy! Mammy! he cried out. The officer removed his helmet, cradled the Negro...