Regeneration in Digital Contexts: Early Black Film

Abstract

O No vem ber 15 and 16, 2013, the Black Film Center/Archives (BFC/A) at Indiana University hosted Regeneration in Digital Contexts: Early Black Film. Funded by a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Office of Digital Humanities grant, this twoday conference and workshop explored the new methodologies and humanities questions emerging through recent scholarship in early black film studies. It also showcased experimental technological approaches to integrating film among other forms of documentation in dynamic structures for discovery, presentation, and analy sis.1 While not formally part of the grant project, the Indiana University Cinema programmed two screenings of early black silent film restorations from the Library of Congress in tandem with the conference: Richard E. Norman’s The Flying Ace (1926) and Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates (1919). The conference drew inspiration from a 2011 article written by film scholar Jacqueline Stewart. Stewart proposes a challenging new avenue for the study of early black film—an area marked by its scarcity of extent documentation—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.’”2 The study of “race movies,” the early motion pictures produced for black audiences in the first decades of the twentieth century, presents an ideal humanities context for framing this inquiry. The many independent producers and distributors, whose work was of en regional in scope and shortlived, lef behind little documentary evidence from which to reconstruct the terrain of the race movie circuit. Of the hundreds of blackaudience films produced since 1905—most notably by Oscar Micheaux—only a small percentage of origi nal film prints are known to exist. Those that survive are of-