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Key words: African American cinema; Tyler, Texas, Black Film Collection, Southern Methodist University; G. William Jones; motion picture archiving; film historiography.
In the Archive, you cannot be shocked at its exclusions, its emptinesses, at what is not catalogued, at what was - so the returned call-slip tells you - "destroyed by enemy action during the Second World War", nor that it tells of the gentry and not of the poor stockinger. Its condition of being deflects outrage: in its quiet folders and bundles is the neatest demonstration of how state power has operated, through ledgers and lists and indictments, and through what is missing from them.
- Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 68.
When a stack of mostly nitrate prints of Blackcast films from the 1930s-1950s was "discovered" in an East Texas warehouse in the early 1980s, the story made headlines across the United States. The films, which came to be known as The Tyler, Texas Black Film Collection, were described as "the missing link in Black cinema" by filmmaker/actor Ossie Davis, and have since been circulated widely via safety film prints and videotapes, DVDs and streaming digital video.1 Discovery is an understandably attractive theme in efforts to fill the many gaps in the historical record. This is especially true for films, "minority"-related materials, and other items that have been traditionally undervalued as historical artifacts by archives, scholars, and the public at large. But in contemporary efforts to recover marginalized histories, we may be so heavily inclined to read such materials as authentic, self-evidently valuabledocuments thatwedonot attendto themany layers of physical and intellectual work that make them available to us, that convert their status from lost to found.
In this essay, I explore how narratives of loss and recovery that we tend to use with regard to fragile and formerly devalued artifacts like the Black-cast films stored in Tyler, Texas can mask a host of assumptions, conflicts, questions and decisions about how historical value should be determined, by whom, and for whom. The transformation of these objects from a pile of neglected canisters to the prized archival collection at Southern Methodist University (SMU) shows how the Tyler, Texas Black Film Collection was not simply found...