Lester Walton's Écriture Noir: Black Spectatorial Transcodings of "Cinematic Excess"

For many scholars and students of American film history, the black press campaign against D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) signifies the founding moment of significant black writing on the cinema. This essay investigates the pre-Birth film criticism of New York Age columnist Lester A. Walton so as to challenge that misconception and recover a lost legacy of early black film spectatorship.