PREVIOUSLY UNIDENTIFIED, 101-YEAR-OLD FILM FOOTAGE DISCOVERED IN
THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART’S COLLECTION IS THE EARLIEST KNOWN
FEATURE FILM MADE WITH BLACK ACTORS
Discovery of Unedited Daily “Rushes” and Subsequent Research Findings Go on View in
the Exhibition 100 Years in Post-Production: Resurrecting a Lost Landmark of Black Film
History on October 24
First Public Screening of Assembled Footage Is Part of MoMA’s Annual To Save and
Project Film-Preservation Festival on November 8
Press Preview: Friday, October 24, 2014, 10:00 a.m.
NEW YORK, September 22, 2014—The Museum of Modern Art announces the discovery of
previously unidentified, 101-year-old film footage, the earliest known surviving feature film with a
cast of black actors. The unedited daily rushes—multiple “takes” shot each day during
production—were found among a trove of 900 negatives from the pioneering Biograph Studio that
were acquired by MoMA’s founding Film curator, Iris Barry, in 1939, just prior to their scheduled
destruction following the closure of Biograph’s Bronx facilities. Though a few other movies from
that period featuring black casts, such as William Foster’s The Pullman Porter (1913) and Hunter
C. Haynes’s Uncle Remus’ First Visit to New York (1914) are known to have been filmed, all are
considered lost. The discovery of the 1913 rushes launched a multiyear research project to
identify the production, its actors, and its crew, led by Ron Magliozzi, Associate Curator, and Peter
Williamson, Preservation Officer, Department of Film, MoMA. Selections from the film, along with
research findings, archival materials, and film stills will go on view October 24, 2014, in the Roy
and Niuta Titus Theater Lobby Galleries in the exhibition 100 Years in Post-Production:
Resurrecting a Lost Landmark of Black Film History (through March 2015). The world
premiere presentation of the assembled rushes will be on November 8, 2014, in MoMA’s annual
film preservation festival To Save and Project (October 24–November 22, 2014), organized by
Joshua Siegel, Curator, and Dave Kehr, Adjunct Curator, with Sophie Cavoulacos, Curatorial
Assistant, Department of Film, MoMA.
Starring the legendary Caribbean American musical theater performer and recording artist
Bert Williams (1874–1922), the seven reels of untitled and unassembled rushes were filmed at
virtually the same time that D. W. Griffith began The Birth of a Nation.
In addition to narrative scenes, the reels reveal candid footage of the black cast and white
crew interacting on set, and several frames of Williams mingling with white extras on a suburban
street location during a break in filming. The rushes also provide nearly eight minutes of
documentary footage of the interracial cast and crew on the New York studio sets and suburban
New Jersey locations (in what is believed to be Englewood).
“Although Bert Williams’s little-known film career took place in the blink of an eye, I
consider him a performer worthy of comparison to Charles Chaplin,” said Mr. Magliozzi. “The
footage had been cataloged noting Williams’s appearance, but it wasn’t until we passed over it
frame by frame on a stop-motion editing table that its significance truly blossomed.”
Of historical relevance is the display of adult romantic feelings between black performers,
which was largely considered unacceptable to white audiences into the first two decades of the
20th century. In the film, a repeated, lengthy kiss between Williams and his costar appears to be
the earliest surviving portrayal of a serious romantic relationship between black characters on
film. The film also features a lengthy early example of African American vernacular dance, with a
nearly two-minute, full-cast performance of a cakewalk, the dance that Williams and partners
George Walker and Aida Overton Walker had made an international sensation with theater
audiences and the white upper class around 1900.
Although no main title, intertitles, script, or production credits have survived with the film,
MoMA’s curators tried to reconstruct the film’s narrative, ultimately piecing together what appears
to be a middle-class comedy centered on the membership of Williams’s character in a black social
club, with an additional plotline concerning Williams and rival suitors vying for the hand of the
local beauty after a day of fairground activities, a bit of larceny, and a night of exhibition dancing.
Over the last decade, Magliozzi also conducted traditional archival analysis and research in
period trade papers such as Moving Picture World, and Harlem’s black daily New York Age, and
readings of recent African American theater studies. The identification of the cast began with
comparing frames of the film with images on sheet music and old press photos, often from the
society and entertainment pages of New York Age. The curators were able to determine that the
cast of between 50 and 100 performers was from a little-known professional community of
virtuoso Harlem entertainers. The film’s blending of minstrel stereotypes and contemporary
performance styles is evidence of a theatrical community’s effort in a time of segregation to
access a new medium as a means of achieving increased visibility. The remarkable number of
performance-based benefits, concerts, carnivals, festivals, picnics, and expositions covered by the
Age between 1908 and 1919 confirm that a talent-rich network of entertainers and elites had
coalesced around organizations like The Frogs and the Colored Vaudeville Benevolent Association.
The zeal of the cast can also be looked upon as evidence of the community’s eagerness to take on
the new medium.
Establishing that the film was shot in the September 1913 was the result of compiling
information from three lines of research: the last films shot with Biograph’s unique “one-hole
camera,” as this one was, were made between October and November 1913; a study of Williams’s
1913–14 recording and performance schedules indicated that he was free and in New York for
roughly two months beginning in late August 1913; and an August 1914 issue of the New York
Age revealed an obituary for Sam Corker Jr., a member of the film’s production crew, providing
the only direct written reference from the period with the lines “Last fall he employed a large
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number of colored performers for the ‘Lime Kiln Club’ series of motion pictures produced by Klaw
and Erlanger in which Bert A. Williams was featured.” The setting of the Lime Kiln Club, which
figures prominently in the film, was taken from a popular syndicated comic of the period.
Most recently, Magliozzi enlisted the services of a professional lip-reader in an attempt to
decipher the film’s dialogue, which was discovered to be largely improvised.
ABOUT BERT WILLIAMS
Born in Nassau to Danish and West Indian parents in 1874, Bert Williams was a light-skinned,
mixed-race singer and performer. His African American persona was a “mask” he wore throughout
his performing career, even in the 80 very popular recordings he made for Columbia Records.
With partner George Walker, he pioneered the advancement of black performance in mixed-race
vaudeville and in all-black musical comedies beginning in the late 1890s. After Walker’s death,
Williams went on to break the color barrier as a black lead in the whites-only casts of the Ziegfeld
Follies from 1910 to 1919. A controversial figure admired in his day by black leaders Booker T.
Washington, W. E. B. DuBois, and James Weldon Johnson, Williams became an icon for a
community of black artists, political thinkers, and writers in the period leading up to the Harlem
Renaissance.
BIOGRAPH FILMS AT MoMA
Biograph began life as the American Mutoscope and Biograph Co. in 1895, going on to become
one of the country’s most prestigious and prolific film producers in the country, giving birth to the
careers of D. W. Griffith, Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, and Lionel Barrymore before ending film
production in 1917. Ironically, the Museum had been in search of Griffith films when it agreed to
remove all of the negatives on short notice from a New Jersey holding company storage vault
rather than let them be destroyed. Over the following years, MoMA’s Department of Film worked
its way through the acquisition, beginning with key titles by Griffith and Mack Sennett, printing
the negatives so the films could be screened, assembling prints, and restoring original intertitles,
most of which were missing. The previously unidentified negative was printed and recorded with
only the name Bert Williams in the 1970s, and was added to the Museum’s resources for scholars.
To Save and Project: The 12th MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation
October 24–November 22, 2014
The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters
Each fall, MoMA’s annual festival of newly preserved films, To Save and Project, brings together
masterworks and rediscoveries from film archives, studios, and foundations from around the
world. Many of the films in the festival will be receiving their first American screening since their
original release; others will be shown in meticulously restored editions that more closely
approximate the original experience of the film; a few will even be publicly screened for the first
time ever in New York. Included among this year’s highlights is a sensational restoration by the
George Eastman House of sequences that Orson Welles filmed, but never used, for the 1938
Mercury Theater production Too Much Johnson. The opening-night film is the North American
premiere of a new MoMA restoration: Allan Dwan’s 1929 masterpiece The Iron Mask, a rousingly
entertaining swashbuckler starring Douglas Fairbanks that is often considered, as Dwan himself
called it, “the last of the big silents.” MoMA’s version, however, contains the entire original
Vitaphone soundtrack—with music, sound effects, and three spoken sequences—which will be
heard here for the first time since the film’s original roadshow presentation. These titles will join
dozens of others from archives both public and private to create a four-week overview of the
tremendously exciting work that is being done around the world to reclaim endangered films and
rediscover forgotten treasures. For more information and a complete screening schedule, please
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visit MoMA.org/film. The exhibition is organized by Joshua Siegel, Curator, and Dave Kehr,
Adjunct Curator, with Sophie Cavoulacos, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Film.
THE MoMA FILM DEPARTMENT
Founded in 1935 as the Film Library, this department's collection now includes more than 22,000
films and four million film stills; the strongest international film collection in the United States, it
incorporates all periods and genres. Among the holdings are original negatives of the Biograph
and Edison companies, and the world's largest collection of D. W. Griffith films. The film collection
is stored in the Museum's Celeste Bartos Film Preservation Center, a state-of-the-art facility that
opened in June 1996.
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Press Contacts:
Paul Jackson, (212) 708-9593 or paul_jackson@moma.org
Margaret Doyle, (212) 408-6400 or margaret_doyle@moma.org
For downloadable high-resolution images, register at MoMA.org/press.
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