Lime Kiln Club Field Day is the earliest surviving feature film with an all-Black cast. Shot between 1913 and 1914 but never finished or released, the film was effectively lost to history until MoMA assembled the archival elements and released the film 100 years later. What we originally acquired from the Biograph Studio in 1939 were seven cans of unedited daily rushes. At the time the negative was printed for viewing in the late 1970s, our staff could see the footage featured Caribbean-American vaudeville star Bert Williams, but that was all. Because the film was never completed there were no release prints to which we could compare our reels, nor were there any production records or reviews. We took it up again in 2003 when new digital technology allowed for closer inspection.
The detective work involved frame-by-frame study of each reel for glimpses of the directors and crew stepping in front of the camera between takes, as well as facial recognition techniques to identify the cast. Curator Ron Magliozzi and preservation officer Peter Williamson conducted research over nearly a decade to decipher the plot of the film and recover its production history, even going so far as to employ a lip reader and explore Staten Island and New Jersey in search of locations.
Had Biograph finished the film, it would have been a broad comedy of rival suitors competing for the hand of the town beauty on fairground playing fields and a high-society dance floor. But what distinguishes Lime Kiln Club Field Day is the love story between Bert Williams and his leading lady, Odessa Warren Grey, arguably the screen’s first Black woman star. The scene featured in this excerpt is one of joy and laughter, an important representation of middle-class Black life in the 1910s, as well as a breath of fresh air in 2020. Since its initial screening, this work has been the Department of Film’s number-one most requested title for both loans and research screenings. Lime Kiln Club Field Day continues to inspire artists such as Garrett Bradley, whose powerful installation incorporating footage from the film, titled America, will be on view at MoMA soon.
Please note: Williams was among a number of leading Black performers who appeared wearing blackface onstage at the turn of the century, and this practice carried over into early films. As we see in this excerpt from Lime Kiln, adopting this convention of the minstrel stage allowed significant numbers of their fellow Black castmates to appear alongside them, without being forced to wear racist makeup as well.
Learn more at Virtual Views: Film Vault Summer Camp
https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5239
Stream this week’s films:
Excerpt from “Lime Kiln Club Field Day” (1914/2014)
Katharine Hepburn as Joan Of Arc in Technicolor Screen Test (1934)
“Kiss” by Andy Warhol (1963–64) – Limited streaming through August 20, 2020
https://youtu.be/LDwWP06sXZA
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The comments and opinions expressed in this video are those of the speaker alone, and do not represent the views of The Museum of Modern Art, its personnel, or any artist.
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