Spotlight: Allyson Nadia Field

TreaAndrea M. Russworm:

Can you give us an idea of the broader critical territory you are working in (especially your focus on films produced prior to 1915) and reflect on some of the themes and stakes inherent in your new projects?

Allyson Nadia Field:

My work is broadly structured around elisions, gaps, and erasures in the historical record, with a focus on African American filmmakers, performers, and audiences. I'm also interested in thinking about the methods of historiography, how and why we do the work of film and media history. For example, in writing about silent-era Black filmmakers like William Foster or Luther J. Pollard, there's an imperative to counter historical erasure and simply provide an account of these easily forgotten figures. Part of my investment in such excavation is to approach them as people, aiming to access their voices and forms of self-representation, and to work against the violence of erasure that has led to their archival and historical elision. This has also meant, as in the case of Uplift Cinema, that I have to develop ways of discussing nonextant films with the attention of care we bring to extant films. It's a zone of speculation, I find, where different historiographic approaches meet.

Figure 1.

Allyson Nadia Field. Photograph by Erielle Bakkum.

Russworm:

Who was William Foster, and what are some of the pleasures and challenges of writing about historical figures for whom there is little material record?

Field:

William Foster is best known to film historians as one of the—if not the—earliest African American filmmakers, making short comedies and actualities in Chicago in the 1910s. But his career is far more expansive, as he worked across theater, film, and publishing from the late nineteenth century until his death in Los Angeles in 1940. He was a manager of touring performers, owned a music store and publishing house, was the business manager of Chicago's first Black-owned theater, and was a celebrated columnist for African American newspapers, writing about entertainment and sports—all before turning to filmmaking when he was about fifty years old. The challenge for scholars is that not only do none of his films survive but there are no records of the first forty or so years of his life. The joy, though, is that by recovering this history, we can unsettle basic assumptions about early Black filmmaking, reveal the intersections of theater and cinema, and rethink the scope of Black popular culture of the period.

Russworm:

The word archive is used in so many contexts today. What does the archive and the phrase archival absence mean to you and your work? In the context of a film?

Field:

It's true that the word archive has been widely used beyond its strict meaning. I don't believe in gatekeeping the usage of the term, but I do believe that as media scholars it's important to be clear about what we're talking about. Is it a climate-controlled repository of nitrate and cellulose acetate film elements, a collection of things, an aggregation of digitally accessible film titles, a metaphor? All these applications are valid, but with filmmaking practices and bodies of work that have suffered from neglect or have been historically undervalued, I think it's especially crucial that we clearly and accurately account for the conditions of the material artifacts at the root of what we're discussing. After all, the material condition of artifacts tells a story about their circulation, the contexts in which they were made and seen, and—crucially—the values and attitudes of the society that stewarded them, or not.

Russworm:

What are some of the ways in which the practice of speculation or the broader critical frame of speculative thinking and speculative imagining relates to telling stories about pre-1915 film history?

Field:

Given the overwhelming loss of film material from this period, speculation is unavoidable. Film scholars have always engaged in degrees of speculation when writing about audiences, spectators, exhibition practices, and so on. This is especially true of African American...