The “cakewalk” dance at the Lime Kiln Club scene is the highlight, in which much of the cast parades, their joy palpable, down a dance line, a precursor by many decades of Don Cornelius and his Soul Train, or the voguing catwalks of ballroom drag and Paris is Burning. the dance scene in Bert Williams Lime Kiln Club Field Day. Perhaps because we are so inured to cinematic images of black Americans as beasts of burden – from Precious to Beasts of the Southern Wild to 12 Years a Slave to Madea Goes to Jail – there is something so amazingly sweet about seeing Williams and his girl, a hundred years ago, leisurely strolling around without a care in the world like they’re Harold Hill and Marion the Librarian in The Music Man. Life was not easy for African Americans in 1913. Indeed, it is shocking to see black people of the time engaging in leisure. But these activities were common events at the kind of field day fair they’re attending, and it’s sweet to see black people going to a fair period, strolling in an Easter parade and riding a merry-go-round.
Particularly cringeworthy are the scenes of black people chasing after a pig, fighting each other for shoes like they’re the latest Nikes, and engaged in a watermelon eating contest.
There are racist tropes in Williams’ film, although you can largely sense the actors working to use them in a manner of disidentification. (Indeed, Magliozzi believes Williams’ film wasn’t initially released because it “It wasn’t racist enough” and Birth’s role as the nation’s first blockbuster sealed its fate.) Made at the same time, Birth would instigate race riots across America and be a rallying cry for the Ku Klux Klan until the 1970s. On the other, this film was made right before black culture would have a major reactionary setback by film, in the form of Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. Also, on the one hand, the film was produced at an ascendant moment for black culture, a generation before the Harlem Renaissance and jazz would alter black art in America. Williams appears as a black actor in blackface, and it’s a strange era for him to be doing so, as blackface by black actors was waning. The plot of the loosely assembled footage, which was never edited until now, is about as loose as that of any Chaplin vehicle, and basically involves Williams, a schemer, trying to woo a young woman over his rivals as he squires her about town.Ĭhaplinesque: ‘it is shocking to see black people of the time engaging in leisure’ Photograph: Museum of Modern Art In a Q&A before the screening, Williams’s comedic screen presence was repeatedly (and rightly) compared to that of Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton by Magliozzi and critic Margo Jefferson. In 1939, it was among 900 negatives acquired from Biograph as part of the MoMA’s founding film collection, when curator Iris Barry was hunting, ironically, for work by racist filmmaker DW Griffith. The process of bringing the film to the public has been an effort “a decade in the making”, MoMA film curator Ron Magliozzi explained in his opening remarks, after it languished for nine decades nearly unwatched. The film is also significant because it is the oldest film of any kind with its “daily rushes” (multiple unedited takes) intact, allowing us to see what was happening behind the scenes, including two white co-directors and a black stage manager directing an all-black cast.
It is a gem of a movie which moved me to tears a couple of times, but which also slapped an irrepressible smile on my face during most of its flickering frames. Produced by Biograph Studio in 1913 and starring Caribbean American star Bert Williams, the never-finished, never-released film (awkwardly titled Bert Williams Lime Kiln Club Field Day) is showing in the Museum of Modern Art’s 12th annual To Save and Project festival. S ometimes I sit down to watch a black and white film and immediately feel depressed as I think to myself: “Everyone I am about to see is dead.” But I felt an unmitigated sense of joy – before, during and after – watching the recently restored dailies of a 101-year-old feature film with an all-black cast.
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