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ABSTRACT: In 2017, the film archivist at the University of Southern California rediscovered a nitrate print from circa 1900 of an African American couple laughing and repeatedly embracing in a naturalistic and joyful manner-a striking departure from the racist caricatures prevalent in early cinema. In this essay, I trace the process of identifying the film as Something Good-Negro Kiss, made in Chicago in 1898 by William Selig with vaudeville performers Saint Suttle and Gertie Brown. Moving from technological artifacts to theatrical history, I argue that the film's rediscovery serves as a case study of the procedure of identifying films and of ascribing historical meaning to early film artifacts, especially around African American subjects.
KEYWORDS: early film, African Americans, film identification, archival rediscovery, historiography, minstrelsy
In January 2017, Dino Everett, the moving-image archivist at the University of Southern California, examined a set of unidentified silent films depicting African Americans that he had purchased years before from a collector in Louisiana. The oldest of these films proved to be a rare find: a near-complete fifty-foot nitrate print from circa 1900 in excellent condition. Yet most surprising was the subject of the film: an African American couple joyously embracing. To Everett, these images seemed incongruous with the stereotypes, racist tropes, and comedic ridicule that tend to characterize early cinema's portrayal of Black subjects.1 When he shared with me a set of digitally scanned frame enlargements of the nitrate reel, I was also taken by the seemingly naturalistic performance that felt so different from racist comedy of this period. The frames revealed a man, dressed in a suit with wide lapels and defined piping that appeared to be from a theatrical costume, holding hands with a woman attired in a dress with wide, ruffled shoulders and flounced sleeves (fig. 1). Smiling and laughing, they kiss four times throughout the print. Unlike early cinema's rampant portrayal of Black subjects in demeaning, racist caricatures, these performers are not the butt of any joke, nor is their kiss a punch line. Rather than sexual lasciviousness or exaggerated caricature, the display of affection between the couple is striking in its tenderness and apparent sincerity. This sense of naturalness is hard to overstate. Suttle and Brown's demonstrated joy and amusement seem genuine rather...