African Cinema Conference presents... Southern Methodist U. Digitizes a Trove of Early African-American Films
By SCOTT CARLSON A collection of rare African-American films that were nearly destroyed will find a new life and a new audience in the digital age. Southern Methodist University has digitized nine black feature movies from the 1930s and 1940s, along with a set of newsreels from the 1950s, and will put them on DVD this fall for distribution. Tinsley Silcox, director of the university library and the film archives, says the university spent $65,000 to restore the films and transfer them to the digital format, a process that will be finished in September. At the beginning of each film, the university has added a short introduction and commentary by film scholars and historians. Southern Methodist acquired the films in the early 1980s. G. William Jones, the founder of the university's film collection, was called to a warehouse to dig through a pile of old film canisters that had been gathering dust for years. The managers of the warehouse were ready to throw out the films that Mr. Jones didn't want. Among the old films were Murder in Harlem, about a young man who is framed for a crime, and Where's My Man Tonight?, a World War II-era film about a soldier who discovers and captures Japanese spies after going AWOL. Broken Earth, a short film about a farmer whose son falls desperately ill, stars Clarence Muse, a well-known early black actor. The films were escapist. They don't address issues of racism or oppression, even subtly, Mr. Silcox says. Some of the films even contain farcical and stereotypical roles for African-Americans, which helped lead to the films' suppression -- in part by African-Americans -- during and after the civil-rights era. "They were an embarrassment," says Patricia McGee, a librarian at Tennessee Technological University who has written about black film and helped establish a black-film collection at Eastern Carolina University. The farcical depictions "reflect a sense of some of the difficulty African-Americans have in placing themselves in society," she says. "They show the parallel lives that blacks had in that period because of segregation." She recalls feeling envious when the collection was discovered. She says the films would be an important addition to a collection because they show that African-American films existed before the civil-rights movement and the eras of Blaxploitation and independent black filmmaking. The university will give 1,000 sets of the DVDs to high schools in Texas. Colleges and universities will be able to purchase them for $250 per set. his article is available online at this address: http://chronicle.com/daily/2003/07/2003072501t.htm >> --- You are currently subscribed to african-cinema-conference as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe, forward this message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To activate the "digest" option go to: <http://purcell.xc.org/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=african-cinema-conference> and enter your screen name and password. Then you can look at your options and make the changes to your membership profile. Please let me know if you have any difficulties. Sade <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
