We've been around since there was, uh, footage.
You just have to look for us.
One of the films that is often credited
with inventing what's called the dynamic montage.
[soft piano music playing]
And that was a D. W. Griffith film,
and the story is of Judith of Bethulia,
who's a good Jewish woman who lives in Jerusalem,
then the invading army is coming.
And Judith, to save the city,
pretends to be a concubine of Holofernes, the general.
And while she is in his tent,
she takes a sword and cuts his head off.
There's a claim that this is one of the first films that we know of
where the cut in the film is used to advance the story.
And there's a kind of, like, trans or, you know, gender non-binary character
who is kind of circulating around the cut in the narrative.
It's almost like the figure of the cut trans body,
the eunuch who's been castrated or emasculated,
who is a cut figure,
presides over...
the invention of the cinematic cut.
It's like trans and cinema have grown up together.
It's like we have always been present on-screen,
and it's not just coincidental.
I mean, there's something really deeply connected.
Can we all just talk about D. W. Griffith for a minute?
As the Missy Elliott song would say, we need to just back it up for a minute.
The fact that we study and teach D. W. Griffith
without saying a word about the representation...
Like, I'm glad I didn't go to film school.
Because if I had seen Birth of a Nation,
when they got to that blackface moment,
when this guy springs up from behind a bush
wanting to rape the white woman,
I...
That would have been it for me at... at film school.
Right? That... that would have been my last day.
Not only is D. W. Griffith incredibly racist,
but he understands
that you can turn gender-nonconforming people
into the joke of your story.
It's like, "Oh, yeah, great, D. W. Griffith,
you, you know, racist piece of shit,
you... you've invented this stereotype in film. Well done."
If you look at that early silent film,
A Florida Enchantment,
it foregrounds questions of gender change
and using blackface
while you're using gendered cross-dressing.
You know, just, like, it's these sort of twin fascinations
that, you know, they're always sort of tangled up with each other somehow.
It's interesting when you look at things historically.
You know, in terms of transmasculine experience.
Like, you know, first, there's no such vocabulary back in the day of...
of trans anything.
In A Florida Enchantment she eats a seed, and then, like, voilà,
she... she wakes up, she's a man.
And, you know, not only were we looking at gender expression,
but at also the racist expectations.
So, the white person becomes this high-society dandy,
like the ideal of what a man should be,
but then her handmaid is forced to take the seed.
She becomes this aggressive valet who's violent.
And so, even in this gender-transgressive fantasy,
you still have white characters in blackface
playing these horribly fantastical versions of black people.
There are lots of ugly things about our history
that feel like an assault, I think.
But I think we have to know them. I think we have to learn them.