AUDIO: Restored 'Race Films' Find New Audiences
Important work / story from NPR...
It's nearly impossible to see some of the earliest movies by African-American filmmakers. Many have been lost or destroyed. Those that have survived are often held by private collectors or stored away in old film archives.
More than a dozen of those movies, though, are now part of a film restoration project — Pioneers of African-American Cinema — by independent film distributor Kino Lorber.
The project focuses on a genre called "race films" — movies made after World War I and through the 1940s by black filmmakers with mostly black casts for black audiences. These films tried to uplift the image of African-Americans and contradict the racist stereotypes in D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, a blockbuster after its release in 1915.
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Permalink Reply by Shirley Durr on
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I would love to see these films in their entirety. I've seen excerpts from some of them. As I remember, there were murder mysteries, comedies, romances, all those genres. I think these are a few of the only resources for seeing musicians like Bessie Smith, Fats Waller, etc. I'm excited by this project.
BTW: I've also seen excepts from Birth of a Nation but have no interest in seeing the entire movie although it's free on YouTube. Just can't stomach the KKK as hero and the salvation of southern white womanhood as they drive back the black menace.
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