Bedsheet Cinema: The Materiality of the Segregating Screen

This essay examines the bedsheet as a historic screen technology while tracing the cultural discourses that emerge from and around the bedsheet as both a cinematic and cultural object. The history of the bedsheet screen reveals origin stories of moving-image exhibition and illuminates the entwined histories of US cinema and race. In its examination of the sheet-screen across a range of moving-image practices and representations in popular and industry discourse, this essay foregrounds the materiality of the screen and its relationship to nontheatrical exhibition sites, segregationist practices, and the social significance of the screen.