Blog 3 – Precis

On “Exhibitions of Faith and Fellowship”

Cara Caddoo’s first chapter “Exhibitions of Faith and Fellowship” in her book Envisioning Freedom covers the role the church, as an institution of black society, had in the spread of a film exhibition practice.

In the postemancipation and post-Reconstruction periods, Caddoo notes that church, the lodge, and the school served as the centers for black life, guided by the philosophy of racial uplift (17). The early 1900s witnessed a migration and urbanization of black communities. “It was at this crossroads of dispersal and desire for collective social and economic advancement,” Caddoo writes, “that an enterprising generation of black cinema pioneers first introduced the moving pictures into black churches, halls, and schools” (17).

In this early era of segregation and migration, Black church leaders helped to build community through erecting prominent structures. Churches, often collectively owned by the congregations themselves, came to represent the determination of the entire race through their “structural and symbolic permanence” (19). However, the expense of the endeavor proved problematic at times, as ambitious ministers lead congregations into financial distress while trying to construct “prestigious buildings to showcase the glory of God with the modern capitalist desire to publicly exhibit the accumulation of material wealth” (19).

Showing films became an essential part of funding raising endeavors for churches. While Caddoo provides a brief description of early venues that played films (pg 20), she emphasizes the ways the equipment needed for a motion picture exhibition played a large role in its success as a medium. Relatively compact, the set up was quite portable, required no electricity, and could be done in a matter of minutes (24). In addition, early films were produced often as one minute clips that could be versatilely assembled for a viewing of whatever was deemed appropriate for the event (20). While flexibility and adaptability were qualities that laid in its favor, a motion picture exhibition was still a gamble because a lot could go wrong. The technology could malfunction or break, or even catch fire and explode. In addition, the cost was prohibitive. After spending so much to build the communities church, the added expense was taxing. Many were skeptical that the new technology could go out of style as quickly as it came in, and that it would be replace with something even better, rendering the original purchase obsolete.

However, film and church proved to be a successful match for the black community for a number of reasons. Showmanship and exhibition were central to the workings of the black church, which served as the heart of social and intellectual life for African Americans (23).   Portable but capable of drawing a crowd, Caddoo notes that the “novel technology was befitting of the spirit of modern progress, an idea dear to the hearts of so many turn-of-the century black church leaders and reformers,” and she notes three basic ways that black institutions earned money from film exhibitions (24).

Caddoo then shifts gears to discussing the production of moving pictures. While providing the powerful self-representational example of the filming and exhibiting of the National Baptist Convention and Women’s Auxiliary, Caddo notes that “even when presenting the films of white production companies, African Americans found creative ways of controlling the meaning of images in their shows” by through the accompaniment of concerts, lectures, and other performances that could alter the reception of the film 26. This was the authorship of the film exhibitor and programs were carefully curated from reels to rented spaces, blurring the lines between filmmaker and exhibitor (28). In organizing programs themselves, African Americans pursued an agenda of self-help, which they saw as critical to achieving their goals of racial advancement” (31).

In all aspects of film exhibition, black women played a critical role (32). Many black women migrated to the South during the period of urbanization, due to the large amount of job opportunities. The were consistently the majority in their congregations, and took up social organizational roles for their churches.   While the assembly of the charity events were often trivialized as “women’s work” or characterized as “frivolities,” black women were running the film marketing and fundraising, and their deep understandings of their communities played a large role in the success of their endeavors. Some worked as itinerant film exhibitors themselves, such as Ednah Jane Walker, adopting a pragmatic approach to racial advancement and noticing the potential of cinema in black life often before their male counterparts (32-35).

At the end of the chapter, Caddoo discusses the important role that trains played in the intraregional migration and the regional travel circuit patterns of motion picture exhibitors. While there was no formal route persay, Caddoo notes, “itinerant exhibition centered in Kansas and Missouri in the West; in the Midwest, the hub was Ohio; in the South, Georgia, Tennessee, and Kentucky were the main centers; and along the eastern seaboard, moving picture show exhibitors traveled between Philadelphia and Baltimore” (36). Once again, “institutional connections and personal relationships that shaped black settlement patterns determined the routes of black film exhibition,” and exhibitors relied on their networks to sow their reputations, book gigs, and find places to stay (38).

Closing with the story of John E Lewis, Caddoo asks us to reconsider “the spaces of black public life and the migratory routes that began in the late nineteenth century,” in order to “[bring] to light a dramatically different and more complex story of black modernity” (41).

An Introduction to Uplift Cinema

The “Introduction” chapter of Allyson Field book Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity contains the following sections:

African American Uplift (3-8)
Uplift Cinema and Race Film (8-13)
Frameworks for Conceptualizing Uplift Cinema (14)
Useful Cinema (14-19)
Local Film (19-22)
The Archive of Absence: A Manifesto for Looking at Lost Film (23-28)
Uplift Cinema (28-31)

Thesis: The “book is about early African American film practices, focusing in particular on films made in the 1910s. It is also about the role of cinema in the larger social, political, educational, and economic project of African American uplift. Lastly, it is about film history and its methodologies, reconstructing a history of uplift cinema entirely out of surviving archival ephemera. As a whole, this book contributes to a historical understanding of the multimedia operations of the uplift project and brings to the fore alternative uses of the medium of film at
a time when its forms and functions were being widely explored by amateurs and professionals alike” (2).

“This introduction has three main tasks: first, to provide an overview of the uplift project as a foundation for understanding how Black cinema functioned at the beginning of the twentieth century; second, to put forth critical frameworks for thinking about uplift cinema as an explicitly useful form of cinema; and third, to articulate a methodological imperative that takes up the stakes and challenges of writing film history about only nonextant films. To this end, I conclude the introduction with a call to look beyond decayed and combusted nitrate stock as victims of time and neglect, arguing that we have as much to discover and learn from absences as we do from surviving artifacts. The film itself is but one component of an expansive network of cultural traces that lead to its myriad functions. Uplift cinema is not only best explained in this way, it also provides a test case for a broader methodology of fihn history” (2).

Field discusses the difference in the uplift movement from the perspective of Washington and Du Bois.