December 10, 2024
The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archive, New York
Subject-Viewer
In her 2021 short film America, Garrett Bradley toys with the concept of “firsts,” placing contemporary shot and developed footage alongside scenes from Lime Kiln Club Field Day, the earliest known feature film with an all-Black cast. Shot in 1913, Lime was abandoned during post-production. Though the reasons for its abandonment are unknown, it’s speculated that its production company feared a movie featuring a kiss between Black leads and the fraternizing of an integrated cast would anger southern audiences.
Lime offers snippets of Black middle-class lives in the early 1910s, joyous as they are mundane. Famed actor Bert Williams pursues a much sought- after woman, the Lady, played by Odessa Warren. In the ensuing hi-jinks- filled courtship, the characters attend a fair patronized mainly by other Black locals but by white townspeople as well. The Black women we meet are well off enough to enjoy leisure and don stylish clothing of the era. They are not objects of derision but girls to be wooed and dined. We see women gossiping over tea and, though the title cards are absent, we can almost hear their banter as they chide the Lady over her new suitor while her mother warns her of the untrustworthiness of men.
Film was a burgeoning industry in the early 20th century, quickly building capital for studios as they launched stars who drew in faithful audiences. Movies from mainstream studios reflected the class racial segregation codified throughout the United States, and commonly casted Black and non-white performers as servants, slaves, drunks, or other characters who could be debased for comic relief. Black artists sought to vary their depictions from the racist stereotypes ubiquitous in films of the period. Though they often still maintained the status quo (the light-skinned Williams appears in blackface, a performance he did frequently, as did some of his peers), Lime reveals an obvious truth that has been largely written out of mainstream film history:; that for almost as long as the medium has existed, Black people have been making films to reflect our lives and to engage our people.
Though a salient discovery of the Black film archive, Lime Kiln Club Field Day is illustrative of the trends and attitudes of its time. Its first release one hundred years later to a modern audience also makes the film a historical text that unearthed new ways of viewing the archive of Black film. The imagined “firsts” of America, filmed in our present day, collide with both the fictional storytelling scenes of Lime and theits real events showcasing the process of the film’s creation. Bradley doesn’t just place these moments in conversation with each other, but instead, situates them all on the same narrative plane, blurring time in the film. She creates a visual study of what Saadiya Hartman calls critical fabulation, in which “the received or authorized account” is upended “[b]y throwing into crisis ‘what happened when.’” This act complicates notions of historical fact and linear progress. wherein a singular achievement sparks another and so on. It’s not sufficient to simply rescue marginalized stories from obscurity for the sake of a spotlight or corrective attribution; the contradictory archive that emerges through this research should throw our entire view of history into crisis.
The events in Bradley’s America occur between 1915 and 1929. By interweaving her own contemporary footage with scenes from Lime, Bradley depicts a series of firsts: Black flight encapsulated by Bessie Coleman, children listening to a radio, the first Black baseball players, the first performance of a symphony composed by a Black woman. Although a symphony written by a Black American woman wouldn't be presented by an orchestra until 1933, America sets this moment alongside the events taken from Lime, calling into question our linear timelines of cultural history. The music of the playing orchestra is set over the silent scenes of Lime's dance social.
In D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), released to wide acclaim two years after Lime was filmed, white actresses appear in blackface to portray the lustful “mistress” of a Union leader and the dotting mammy, loyal to her southern masters. In an essay for Film Comment, critic Ashley Clark points out that only one Black woman is actually present in the film:, the actress Madame Sul-Te-Wan, playing a brief role of a former slave. None of these characters, however, are humanized. Instead they serve as devices to exhibit the supposed weakness of the Union and to cast the Confederacy and its stalwarts as the triumphant saviors of America.
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In 1888, four people dressed in middle-class Victorian garb were captured walking about an English lawn in afternoon sunlight in what is considered by many to be the first moving image. In what now looks more like a proto-GIF than film, the two second clip, dubbed Roundhay Garden Scene, is hardly extraordinary when viewed without the context of its principality in mind. Yet in the late 1880s, still photography as we presently know it was only decades old. The development of images that captured the movement of life’s gestures would have been unprecedented and Roundhay creator Louis Le Prince was poised to usher the world into a new modernity. But before he could unveil his new technologies to the public, he vanished. Presumed dead, his whereabouts were never discovered.
Le Prince’s disappearance cast his achievements into relative obscurity. Thomas Edison was quick to name himself inventor of the motion picture. But it is often the French brothers, Auguste and Louis Lumière, who are credited with the advent of the collective moviegoing experience. The brothers’ short film, Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, spawned an urban legend of primitive movie audience members, who when unable to decipher the filmic image from reality, fled in terror at the sight of an oncoming train on screen.
This all made up part of a race at the end of the 19th century to realize moving images and invent a new form. The history of who or what came first remains unfixed, an unsteady marker of achievement that shifts with the unearthing of new information and the retreading of old facts. Any first is eventually scrutinized for its lack. Judged at a distance, claiming the title of a “first” can appear eager but naive, a site of myth-making, melding folklore and fact.
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In 1940, Hattie McDaniel walks across the Ambassador Hotel’s Coconut Grove Restaurant to raucous applause as she goes to retrieve her Academy Award. The presenter, Fay Bainter, has just given a brief congratulatory speech on America’s racial progress ahead of announcing McDaniel as Best Supporting Actress for her role as Mammy in Gone With the Wind. Still one of the highest grossing movies of all time, the film follows the life of Scarlett O’Hara, the daughter of a plantation owner, right before the Civil War and through Reconstruction.
In the clip of her win, you can't see where McDaniel is walking from or where she walks to after accepting her award. Off camera, she sat at a table placed away from the other attendees and her Gone With the Wind co-stars. This was the concession offered to the Academy Awards and the producers of Gone With the Wind by the Ambassador Hotel, which enforced a whites-only policy at the time. Two months earlier, McDaniel and her Black co-stars were infamously barred from attending the movie’s first premiere in Jim Crow Atlanta at the Fox Theater. Claiming fears for the group’s safety, Gone With the Wind producer, David O. Selznick, relegated McDaniel to a single image on the back cover of a souvenir program.
While watching America, I half expected some allusion to the first Black Oscar win, or for Hattie herself to appear with her rhinestone studded blue dress and the white gardenias she wore in her hair the night of the awards. Gone With the Wind, which has its 85th anniversary this year, premiered in 1939. That same year the Museum of Modern Art acquired Lime, which remained unfinished in its potential to disrupt the segregated and caricature-filled world of Hollywood films.
The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archive, New York
It’s likely that I initially learned of McDaniel as an important Black first, celebrated for her Academy win in a brief Black History Month segment that ran in between programs on the PBS or Turner Classic Movie channels. Her radiant smile broadcast over generic jazz as a voice narrated her complicated triumph. McDaniel was less discussed in school or in the living rooms of my relatives than her trailblazing peers like George Washington Carver or Madame C.J. Walker, likely due to controversy around the role of Mammy. The character exemplified some of the worst stereotypes about Black American women—coddling of and subservient to white women—and reinforced the lie that enslavement was enjoyed by Black southerners.
When I was around fifteen and just falling in love with movies, I hung up my first non-music related poster in my room: 101 GREATEST MOVIE QUOTES. The list was decontextualized and ultimately represented a small sliver of the American film canon, yet it became my introduction to other movies outside my reliable stable of teen rom-coms and episodes from syndicated series. Sitting at number one was a quote from Gone With the Wind. The chance to watch the film arose frequently and yet each time it appeared on the television screen, I clicked away from the sweeping technicolor plantations and from McDaniel attentively dressing Vivian Leigh. Despite the movie’s status as one of the best, I was wary. It gave me a similar discomfort as popular films of the late 2000s like Freedom Writers, The Blind Side, and Precious, which purported insight into overlooked Black life. The stories were described by critics as “visceral,” “powerful” and “affirming.” To me, though, supposed realities seemed bent into caricatures that utilized racist tropes of sexual deviance and poverty to depict Black children in need of (white) salvation. Watching such films, I got the sense I was supposed to feel uplifted, understood, or at the very least grateful that though I might have been relatively poor, I was unscathed by the worst possible outcomes. Yet they left me hollow, unlike many white critics and audiences.
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“Did you see Gone With the Wind when you were young?” I asked my mom in a text as I embarked on a days-long feat to finish the movie in preparation for writing this essay.
Like many people of her age, my mother is an dilettante scholar of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Alongside the VHS copies of Disney movies my sister and I rewatched as kids were my mother’s copies of A Place in the Sun, All About Eve, and Clint Eastwood Westerns. Every Easter we watched the ABC broadcast of Cecile B. Emille’s epic, The Ten Commandments, a ritual my sister and I rarely challenged. “Let my people go,” my mother would bellow in unison with Charlton Heston’s Moses. She’d laugh at the special effects of Mose’s staff morphing into a serpent in a way that signaled her close familiarity with the scene that once shocked her in her youth. Listening to the songs of Etta James or Aretha Franklin, my mother might suddenly recall her love of the similarly glamorous Elizabeth Taylor, a fine actress in her collection of jewelry and men, who commanded the screen in Cleopatra.
“I remember watching Ben Hur, King of Kings, The Ten Commandments, and The Wizard of Oz,” my mom said, but Gone With the Wind was not a part of my childhood memories.
“Did you like it when you saw it as an adult?”
“Well, I did not. I hated the way slavery was sanitized and the ‘maid’ was so happy to be a slave,” she explained, before relaying a familiar family history of Alabama sharecropping, the legal successor of chattel slavery.
At five years old, the story goes, my Granny started picking cotton for a nickel a day and was assaulted by the son of the landowners her family worked for when she was a child. She wedded young, to a light-eyed man with a cruel streak, before moving to Ohio after the birth of their fourth child (she would eventually have eight total).
In Ohio, Granny initially worked as a maid, tending to the needs of stay-at-home white women, one of whom would send Granny home with cans of expired food that were quickly disposed of, unopened. She frequently brought her work home—bushel baskets of bedding, table cloths, and clothing to be sorted and pressed. “That’s when I first learned how to iron at eight or nine,” my mom explained.
Outside of the character of Mammy, my mom is softer on McDaniel. “She did what she had to do.”
McDaniel, like all Black women, was trying to survive. Her famous quote in which she proclaimed to critics that she’d rather play a maid than be one may appear flippant and dismissive. However, the reality of domestic labor was not unknown to McDaniel, who worked as a maid prior to her film career and was acquainted with the difficulties of poverty. To her, playing a maid truly had proven to be better than being one. Acting provided a stable income that allowed her to retain her dignity.
The aversion my grandmother, mother, and I have felt towards Gone With the Wind is not uncommon among Black viewers. Though critics of HBO’s decision to remove the film from its platform in 2020 condemned the choice as oversensitivity and bowing to “cancel culture,” the film has long been a subject of derision, especially among Black Americans, even prior to its release. Black leaders and critics, notably Walter White of the NAACP, called for a boycott of the film when it was released. The Chicago Defender, an influential Black newspaper of the time, said that Gone With the Wind “made of Negro womanhood a wanton wench.” The article named the movie as a calculated “weapon of lies and misrepresentation,” more pernicious even than The Birth of a Nation, which is believed to have revived the ku klux klan.
Hattie McDaniel, 1941
At what should have been the height of their careers, McDaniel and her Black co-stars were the subject of scrutiny and scorn by much of the Black community. Mammy was far from the first stylization of this trope by other actresses and McDaniel (despite her extensive background as a theater actor and blues singer). Along with the justified criticism and denunciation of Gone With the Wind, there was a simultaneous push for a depiction of idealized Blackness, for which Walter White—who had blonde hair and blue eyes and was born into a middle-class Black family—saw McDaniel, the daughter of two former slaves, as unfit representation.
This sentiment is reflected in Lime and other movies of the area, such as the work of groundbreaking director Oscar Micheaux, which often focused on the respectability of middle and upper-class aspirations and prominently featured light-skinned actresses in such roles. The impulse to challenge the caricatures of Black Americans that were culturally pervasive is understandable. Pushing people to view these characters critically has been imperative to the evolution of not just film, but culture in general. Yet these messages of uplift often came at the expense of the working poor of the time.
Not long after McDaniel’s Oscar win, White introduced Hollywood to actress Lena Horne, who he hoped, with her cafe-au-lait skin a la Josephine Baker and educated Black family background, would usher in a new era for Black women in American movies. In Horne, White saw the possibility of a Black starlet who could unseat McDaniels and other (stereo)typecasted Black actors. And as expected, Horne was extremely successful.
Despite being pitted against one another, Horne and McDaniel sympathized with each other. In a later interview with Dick Cavette, Horne describes visiting McDaniel’s home in California: “She said ‘You’re a very unhappy girl and I understand why. Your own people are mad with you and the other ones don’t know what’s happening…You got to work.’ she said, ‘Just do what you gotta do.’”
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Growing up, I more frequently encountered contemporary period pieces with Black stars than movies from before the 1950s with major Black characters. These contemporary movies—which included the likes of Beloved, A Time to Kill, Mississippi Burning, Ghosts of Mississippi, and Amistad—were taught both at home and at school as historical texts. They elucidated the narrative of slavery and its aftermath, an unfinished though still triumphant progressive march toward equity for Black Americans. I accepted the liberal fantasy of meritocracy, letting it carry me to a college in New York City, despite my complete lack of funds and what I described as my state of homelessness (prior to enrolling, I had been living in a women’s home with my mother).
At art school, where I joined the writing program and minored in cinema studies, my understandings of race, gender, and class were expanded by first encountering feminist texts, especially those authored by Black women. bell hooks’ “Oppositional Gaze'' permanently altered how I viewed movies, and a class on the Harlem Renaissance gave me the categories of other filmic stereotypes of Black women that I intuited as wrong but lacked language to articulate my distaste for: the Mammy, the Sapphire, the Jezebel, and so on.
I took my new knowledge back to Ohio. More and more, I felt alienated from many that I’d grown up with who saw my learnings about class and race as arrogant ramblings, divorced from their day-to-day lives. But back on campus I also felt out of place among peers whose access to wealth was unfathomable to me. At home, the rich were the kids of parents who ran local McDonald’s franchises, while at Pratt I met students whose parents were CEOs of national chains.
In the mid 2010s when I was in college, another archetype of Black woman emerged in video, film, and also crucially on social media. She was the subject of such slogans as “Black women will save us.” Mark Ruffalo said he saw God and it was Her. Beautiful and stately, sexually desirable and wise, she seemed to be a convergence of the Mammy, Sapphire, and Jezebel into one, chastising friends and followers alike to heed her call to understand the racist underpinnings of all things American. She could be the protagonist of Justin Siemen’s Dear White People, or the speaker in an anti-racist educational Instagram video. Sometimes, she was me.
Such content converged with the proliferation of viral videos of real Black death: Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Korryn Gaines. Their lives were simultaneously amplified and reduced to these moments of brutality, as footage of their final moments circulated alongside posts, songs, tweets, movie trailers, and selfies. Corporate in-fighting such as the “Oscars So White” campaign was placed in the context of these deaths, as if they had equal material importance.
I struggled. Aligning myself with and against various causes; contradicting myself. I made a vow to stop watching movies about slavery or any other movie that depicted Black strife or suffering. This was easy since I had viewed fewer movies and television in general since moving to New York, where I didn’t have a television and couldn’t find a $5 matinee. In a film class, I argued with my classmates about how every Oscar win or nomination for a Black woman was for a role depicting her subjugation. Was I right? I hadn’t seen most of the films I decried, but who could argue? I was angry. I couldn’t then see the breadth of Black filmmaking I was denying.
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It was Barry Jenkins who convinced me to give up my resolve against viewing movies about slavery. His 2021 TV series The Underground Railroad, based on Colson Whitehead’s novel of the same title, dislodged my already waning belief that no new value could be found in such tales. The show follows runaway slave Cora in her journey north with the help of the Railroad, a literal train used by escapees and their allies. The series is similar to America in its bold reinvention of linear history. It differs from predecessor slave films in that its focus is not only on Cora’s quest for freedom but on her self-discovery.
Representation was never meant to save anyone. This adage is perhaps banal but pertinent still, especially when the Israeli genocide of Palestinians and occupation of Palestine is supported by the United States’ first Black president, its first Black woman vice president and now president hopeful, and the White House’s first Black woman press secretary.
“Our memories are short-lived,” Hattie McDaniel wrote in a 1947 essay. Though she was defending her work and the (in her view) varied work of Black actors in Hollywood studio films, there is wisdom in her statement. I think of my younger self, quick to dismiss certain Black films without engaging because it was easier than wrestling with incongruities.
Upon their original releases, racist films like The Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind featured disclaimers that the subjects did not aim to cause offense to anyone but simply to tell the true, unvarnished history of the South. Such statements undoubtedly aided in the whitewashing tropes about Black women and the brutality of slavery, yet we have always known the lies of such claims. The evidence of this fact rests in plain view in archives, waiting to be witnessed.
Madison Jamar is a writer from Columbus, Ohio who lives in New York. Her work has been featured in Polyester, Black Lipstick, 68to05, Catapult, and more.