News from the Black Film Center/Archive

Digital Humanities

In November 2013, Black Film Center/Archive archivist Brian Graney and director Michael T. Martin will convene an interdisciplinary group of scholars, moving image archivists, and library professionals for a two-day conference and workshop to discuss the new methodologies and questions emerging through recent scholarship in early black-audience film studies and their broader application to other marginalized media cultures with rich histories of material practice. The program, “Representing Early Black Film Artifacts as Material Evidence in Digital Contexts,” is supported in part by a 2013 Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Of the hundreds of black-audience films produced in the first decades of the last century, only a small percentage of original film prints are known to exist. Those that survive are found in fragmentary form or in markedly different versions. In a 2011 article, Jacqueline Stewart proposed a challenging new avenue for this area of study 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.’”¹

Jan-Christopher Horak, director of the UCLA Film and Television Archive, notes that “unlike Hollywood features, which were released in sometimes hundreds of prints, Black independent film producers often struck only single prints, screening them until wearing them out before making a new print. These surviving prints reveal which film stocks were used, often include extraneous material cut in by exhibitors, and when the films were struck after the film’s initial release … such information is vital in reconstructing a work’s exhibition history.”²

Reconsidering how we define the content of a film print to encompass all of its physical characteristics, markings, and structures as a material artifact introduces important questions bearing on how film is represented as a digital object: How can we amend current best practices for digitization of motion picture film which by design omit or obscure physical attributes of the original artifact? What tools might be turned to unconventional uses in representing film artifacts digitally for close examination and study? And how might this representation of film as object offer a conceptual bridge for integrating audiovisual media within a wider network of related visual and textual documentation? “For the study of early African American cinema,” writes project advisor Stewart, “this exploration of the use of digital technologies to capture—rather than obscure—material details from surviving film prints will be an extraordinary boon, allowing scholars to perform closer analyses that take into account physical traces on these rare artifacts.”³

The conference will be held on Friday, November 15, at the Indiana University Cinema; the workshop will be held on Saturday, November 16, at the Black Film Center/Archive. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, will present a keynote address. Other invited conference participants include Matthew Bernstein (Emory University); Allyson Field (UCLA); Terri Francis (University of Pennsylvania); Jan-Christopher Horak (UCLA Film & Television Archive); Leah Kerr (Academy Museum of Motion Pictures collections coordinator); Barbara Tepa Lupack (independent scholar); Mike Mashon (Library of Congress, Moving Image Section); Charlene Regester (UNC-Chapel Hill); Jacqueline Stewart (Northwestern University); and Dana White (Emory University).

Indiana University faculty and staff contributing to the conference and workshop program include: Cara Caddoo (American Studies); William Cowan (IU Libraries Software Development); Barbara Klinger (Communication and Culture); Rachael Stoeltje (IU Libraries Film Archive); Gregory Waller (Communication and Culture); and John A. Walsh (Library and Information Science).

Public Programs

During the spring 2013 semester, the Black Film Center/Archive coordinated and cosponsored a variety of screenings and related events. As the cornerstone of the film series Living King’s Legacy, part of the 2013 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Celebration at Indiana University, the pioneering filmmaker and producer Madeline Anderson presented I Am Somebody (1970), her documentary on the 1969...