[late post- had it saved but not uploaded]
What my group ended up seeing was content regarding Oscar Micheaux’s The Brute, a silent race film from the early 20th century. There’s not too much mention of him in the George P Johnson transcripts, and, where he does crop up, he is referred to as “one of the most colorful characters”, with a record “none too savory” though “too interesting and valuable to be overlooked.”. It describes Micheaux’s initial success writing The Homesteader (a somewhat autobiographical account that replaced white people with black ones), and his desire to see it realized in film, which eventually lead Micheaux to create his own film company.
There’s something pretty compelling about encountering the actual material. Beyond the obvious- the size of the advertisements, the format of telegraphs, the delicacy and age of the objects feels somehow monumental. There’s a type of accumulation that only happens on physical objects, an index of their passages through time and space- how many people have touched these objects? Micheaux lived until 1951, and didn’t see the Civil Rights movement, didn’t see the first Black president. These objects are evidence both of the moment in which they existed, and the moments that followed them, and exist in the difference between them. This is a bit of the aura that Benjamin refers to, part of the power they hold.
Of course, there’s more to think about- these objects engage mass production and infrastructure- telegraphs are long obsolete, and print media is starting to follow it. Cinema isn’t out yet, but things like Netflix might be starting to cut into it.
The problem of digital media is that it’s static, and it’s reductive- there’s an ontological mismatch between the configuration of atoms and molecules in a physical object and data, which means we always lose something while digitizing it. We can’t yet receive the sensation of how it smells, the way that it cracks and folds.
More particular to this object, though, I was kind of struck by the ways that The Brute’s ad copy played into certain tropes of exploitation film- an innocent, pure woman on the floor, in the thrall of a violent man whose motto is “to make a woman love you, knock her down”. As much as has changed, the presence of sex and violence seems not to. Without seeing the movie itself, though, it’s impossible to know for sure whether this is the case. Signifiers shift and conventions of genre change over time- and a contemporary viewer aided by contemporary film theory may be able to see other things within the work. Sadly, though, the film is thought not to exist any more. Much of early film was not properly archived, and, likely, doubly so for early film that originated from marginalized perspectives.