Regeneration in Digital Contexts: Early Black Film

On November 15 and 16, 2013, the Black Film Center/Archives (BFC/A) at Indiana University hosted Regeneration in Digital Contexts: Early Black Film. Funded by a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Office of Digital Humanities grant, this two-day conference and workshop explored the new methodologies and humanities questions emerging through recent scholarship in early black film studies. It also showcased experimental technological approaches to integrating film among other forms of documentation in dynamic structures for discovery, presentation, and analysis.¹ While not formally part of the grant project, the Indiana University Cinema programmed two screenings of early black silent film restorations from the Library of Congress in tandem with the conference: Richard E. Norman’s The Flying Ace (1926) and Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates (1919).

The conference drew inspiration from a 2011 article written by film scholar Jacqueline Stewart. Stewart proposes a challenging new avenue for the study of early black film—an area marked by its scarcity of extent documentation—by identifying unmined evidentiary value in what “we can learn from the singularity of each print … and what any existing print might teach us about the circulation, exhibition, and content of movies in this under documented film culture. Indeed, when we think of each print as a unique artifact, we are encouraged to reconsider what we think of as a film’s ‘content.’”²

The study of “race movies,” the early motion pictures produced for black audiences in the first decades of the twentieth century, presents an ideal humanities context for framing this inquiry. The many independent producers and distributors, whose work was often regional in scope and shortlived, left behind little documentary evidence from which to reconstruct the terrain of the race movie circuit. Of the hundreds of black-audience films produced since 1905—most notably by Oscar Micheaux—only a small percentage of original film prints are known to exist. Those that survive are often in fragmentary form or in markedly different versions, demanding close comparative analysis against other prints and documents widely dispersed across various institutions, including local censorship records, film scripts, newspaper accounts, and promotional images. Further, historians of black-audience film have a strong record of engaging with its material culture, and of observing the unintended influence on critical thought of past technologies for film reproduction.

Summary of the Conference Proceedings

Setting out to explore these issues, the conference began with opening remarks by BFC/A archivist Brian Graney. John Lucaites, Associate Dean for Arts and Humanities, welcomed conference participants and reminded them of the importance of the work being done in the digital humanities to advance the study of black film:

While the study of film is not the only place such work takes place and while exploring and exploiting the capacity of digital technologies to advance such work through processes of regeneration is not the only way in which to advance such concerns, there is no question that the study of film and in particular the historical study of its earliest circuits of circulation, exhibition, and content point to an important dimension of our cultural history. That it is being done here with creative methods to take advantage of the recent turn to the digital humanities and with respect to early black film in particular a medium and genre whose past we otherwise risk losing to all memory makes it all the more important.

Shola Lynch (Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library) delivered the keynote address, chronicling her research history with visual evidence of black America and her goals for developing reference resources that mine the moving image and sound collections of the Schomburg Center. One particular challenge she’s faced is the task of locating materials scattered throughout public and private collections because they’ve been categorized under various headings due to the inconsistencies of institutional taxonomies.

Greg Waller (Indiana University) moderated the first of the conference’s three panels, “The State of Research and Platforms for Access,” which featured presentations from Cara Caddoo (Indiana University), Matthew Bernstein (Emory University), and Dana White (Emory University). Caddoo began by...