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  • Filmmaker’s Journal:Notes on The Lincoln Film Conspiracy
  • Ina Diane Archer (bio)

Or does it explode?

—Langston HugHes1

My film The Lincoln Film Conspiracy is based on a fragment of film I once glimpsed in Pearl Bowser’s documentary Midnight Ramble: Oscar Micheaux and the History of Race Movies (1994). The damaged morsel from By Right of Birth (1921) shows the horseback rescue of a damsel by a dapper man. It is the only footage remaining from The Lincoln Motion Picture Company, an African-American studio that produced race movies or films made for segregated black audiences in the silent era.2

I don’t recall when I first saw Midnight Ramble, but it stuck in my mind because, as a studio fellow with the Whitney Independent Study Program, I had been working on video installation projects that explored racial and ethnic cross dress (i.e., minstrelsy) in musicals, comedies, and ephemeral entertainment (like Vitaphone soundies and short subjects). Such films flourished during the technological transitions of the late 1920s and early 1930s as technicians and artists experimented with new creative methods like synchronized sound and two-strip Technicolor, and I wondered how these innovations related to the social situation of African Americans. I continued this exploration in early film history at New York University, where I had gone to pursue my growing interest in film preservation and the business of film canon building: What films get preserved and why? Who decides? What gets overlooked? How is value determined?

Whenever I saw the Lincoln clip that Bowser had included in her documentary, I was intrigued again and again. It fascinated me precisely because nothing was happening in it other than the “meet-cute”3 typical in movies of the era except that the actors were black. [End Page 226]

And somewhere in the back of my mind was Arthur Jafa’s “what if ” of a cinematography or even a photochemistry that ancient Africans invented. In his published remarks, Jafa theorizes that the hand-cranked camera, which gives the flicker to silent film, was more appropriate to capturing the expressive form or “plasticity (much like a talking drum)” of human motion—of black motion. He says, “We have to be able to … break it down, sometimes very hypothetically and retroactively … almost as in science fiction and say, ‘what if we had put the apparatus that we understand as cinema in Africa five hundred years ago? What would we have now?’”4 What happened to Lincoln’s race films, I wondered, and what were they like?

Eventually, I wrote a treatment or a very short story about the lost Lincoln films in which I imagined their fictional historiography, and it would likely have remained merely an idea but support from Creative Capital helped me to develop my proposal into a project. My narrative was as follows:

A researcher interviews characters both scholarly and those of dubious mental states, asking what has become of the Lincoln Film archive? Conspiracy theories are outlined: a government plot in conjunction with Hollywood to destroy these “positive” films, leaving only denigrating images of blacks; an elderly actor suggests the films were burnt by a light-skinned Negro actor who, passing for white in Hollywood, needed all evidence of his true identity annihilated. Perhaps the films combusted as unstable films often do. Evidence of great heat is found in the vicinity of the studio’s site. A local restaurateur remembers recipes made with unusual regional vinegar. Did we eat our cinema history on our salads? Others are indicted by memory. Inevitably, a crackpot propounds alien abduction. The frustrated researcher closes her search.

This story references the many ways that nitrate films deteriorate, decompose, and eventually can detonate. Later film stocks, when improperly stored, chemically erode and emit a noxious warning odor, called in pres erva tion parlance “vinegar syndrome.” But it also speaks to the volatility of un fulfilled personal and collective needs.

Throughout the Lincoln project’s development, Langston Hughes’s poem “Harlem” has indirectly influenced me. The line “What happens to a dream deferred?” provides a central metaphor in my narrative, linking rotting combustible film to deferred dreams, suppressed black expression, and negative cinematic...

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