Acts of Love
Black Performance and the Kiss That Changed Film History
-
- $20.99
-
- $20.99
Publisher Description
"This book doesn't just fill gaps in film history; it demands that we confront why those gaps existed in the first place. A fascinating read for lovers of film."—Ava DuVernay
The rediscovery of the first film to depict African American affection revises the history of American cinema.
In 1898, vaudeville actors Saint Suttle and Gertie Brown joyously embraced in a short silent film titled Something Good—Negro Kiss. The first known film to portray African American affection, it was lost for over a century until its rediscovery inspired contemporary audiences with a powerful and enduring depiction of Black love. More than a missing piece in an untold history of Black cinematic performance, Something Good—and the magnetism of Suttle and Brown—attests to the power of Black performance on stage and screen from the nineteenth century to today.
In Acts of Love, Allyson Nadia Field tells the story of Something Good and recovers the forgotten yet fascinating lives of its performers and their world. Drawing a vivid picture from sparse historical records, Acts of Love examines popular culture's negotiation of blackness to reconsider the intersections of minstrelsy, vaudeville, and cinema in ragtime America. This book not only presents the story of Something Good, its performers, and the drama of its rediscovery; it shows how the rediscovery of this short early film changes our understanding of American film history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In 2017, an archivist at the University of Southern California discovered a nitrate print of a forgotten early ragtime-era film that revises notions of Black representation in early American cinema. This rigorous history from Field (Uplift Cinema), an associate professor of cinema at the University of Chicago, unpacks the significance of the film, Something Good—Negro Kiss, which depicts a young Black man and woman, played by actors Saint Suttle and Gertie Brown, "joyously embracing," and represents a departure from 19th-century film, which relegated Black actors to demeaning roles as racist caricatures or comic buffoons. The newly discovered film, made by William Selig in 1898, was not a mockery of Black courtship for the benefit of "white gawkers," according to the author, but a "media savvy" play on the first onscreen kiss, filmed in 1896 between John C. Rice and May Irwin, a well-known white minstrel actress. In remaking the Rice-Irwin film with Black actors, Something Good implicitly mocked Irwin's "racial masquerade," calling out "minstrelsy's grotesque fantasies of blackness" while speaking to Black humanity, romance, and desire. In the face of a sparse historical record, Field performs impressive sleuthing to detail the film's production, distribution, and historical context, while also exploring remakes by contemporary filmmakers in such shorts as 2020's Glenville. The result is a nuanced study that expands notions of Black representation in early American film.
