Allyson Nadia Field, Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity

Abstract

Reviewed by: Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity by Allyson Nadia Field Julie Lavelle Allyson Nadia Field, Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015 In her ambitious book, Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity, Allyson Nadia Field makes an important contribution to film history, broadly speaking, as well as to the growing scholarship on African American film culture in the early twentieth century. Field’s exacting primary research expands the historical record in several directions by both deepening our understanding of the role of media in the social and political movement of racial uplift, and by revising the standard periodization of “race film” to account for African American filmmaking practices prior to 1915. In a 2013 report from the Library of Congress, historian David Pierce estimates that 70 percent of American films made [End Page 242] between 1912 and 1930 are permanently lost. For the period prior to 1912 the number is even higher. Field notes that there are no extant prints of uplift cinema. Her work tackles one of the central methodological questions facing silent film historians: how do we write film history without films? One response to this question has been to center the films that remain. In terms of the history of African American filmmaking, this has privileged race films: narrative films produced by African American filmmakers in the late 1910s and 1920s. Film historians have largely interpreted race films as emerging out of the controversy surrounding D. W. Griffith’s racist representation of African Americans in Birth of a Nation (1915). Another approach to this methodological question is most clearly articulated by Eric Smoodin, who claims that shifting attention away from the text is where the field is (and should be) headed; according to him we should take André Bazin’s concept “What is cinema?” and rework it, posing instead, “What is cinema culture?” Allyson Nadia Field intervenes to challenge both of these methodologies. She turns her attention to the years prior to 1915, when the earliest efforts at black film production emerged out of Tuskegee, the Hampton Institute, and the larger social and civic project of race uplift. For Field, race film begins prior to 1915, includes a wide variety of genres, and engages in various ways with uplift. In addition, Field refuses to sideline the film texts, and instead develops a framework for performing textual analysis and ideological criticism by excavating an impressive array of sources adjacent to uplift cinema. Working with novels, publicity, and promotional materials, postcards, photographs, newspaper editorials, trade reviews, and internal institutional documents, Field reconstructs the earliest years of African American film production in the United States. Field provides background on the uplift movement and its development in the South, primarily by analyzing materials from Tuskegee and the Hampton Institute. She locates and defines a set of aesthetic strategies employed in uplift media that highlighted the positive contributions of successful African American graduates of these institutes, while nevertheless foregrounding the constant threat of failure. She explores the production of films made to publicize the Tuskegee-Hampton ideal by George Broome (A Trip to Tuskegee, 1910), Louis B. Anderson (A Day at Tuskegee, 1913), and Leigh Richmond Miner (Making Negro Lives Count, 1914). Particularly fascinating is the chapter on The New Era, a repurposed version of Miner’s Making Negro Lives Count that was appended to the end of The Birth of a Nation during its exhibition in the mid-1910s. She ends the book with a chapter dedicated to African American entrepreneurs William Foster, Peter J. Jones, and Hunter C. Haynes. [End Page 243] Field selects these films and filmmakers for closer analysis in order to demonstrate the diverse use of the films for promotional, educational, and entertainment purposes. She demonstrates effectively the critical role that exhibition played in shaping meaning, and the ways that the ideology of uplift might have been understood differently in different contexts and by different audiences. Exhibition practices at this time were incredibly varied, and a great deal of control was in the hands of local...