USC HMH Foundation Moving Image Archive
A still from 1898 “Something Good — Negro Kiss,” currently on display at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures’ exhibit “Regeneration: Black Cinema, 1898–1971”.
“I feel like I’m in heaven!” gushed a glowing Ava DuVernay.
I overheard the director of 2014’s Civil Rights-era epic Selma at an August 17 press preview of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures’ Regeneration: Black Cinema, 1898–1971 praising “the first large-scale exhibition…to examine the compellingly rich history of Black participation in American cinema, both inside and outside the Hollywood studio system,” as co-curators Rhea L. Combs and Doris Berger write in their 288-page companion book with the same name as the groundbreaking show.
As the director of 2016’s mass incarceration documentary 13th, and the 2019 film about the Exonerated Five, When They See Us, DuVernay issued her rave review of Regeneration currently showing in the Marilyn and Jeffrey Katzenberg Gallery—an 11,000-square-foot space that, according to an Academy Museum press release, displays “rarely seen excerpts of films, documentaries, newsreels, and home movies, as well as historical photographs, costumes, props, and posters” chronicling and celebrating more than seventy years of often-ignored yet significant African-American contributions to cinema. The spectacular, sprawling show covers most of the museum’s fourth floor.
The exhibit, which opened August 21 and runs through April 9, 2023, “will be accompanied by a range of film screenings, including world premieres of films newly restored by the Academy Film Archive,” according to a museum press release. The in-depth display is full of finds and revelations for rank-and-file filmgoers and movie historians alike. For instance, the expo is named after a 1923 picture titled Regeneration: A Romance of the South Seas, produced by the Florida-based Norman Film Manufacturing Company, which was white-owned but specialized in features and shorts starring all-Black casts.
I’m a historian of South Seas Cinema—movies shot and set in the Pacific Islands, such as Mutiny on the Bounty—and have co-authored three film history books about this genre. And yet I’d never heard of Regeneration before the Academy Museum’s exhibit. Only fragments of footage from this long-lost picture still exist, but much to the museum’s credit, they have been assembled and are screened as part of the exhibit.
In big picture terms, Regeneration aims at restoring and rehabilitating the screen image of African Americans, who were frequently disparaged via celluloid stereotypes and through malign neglect by Tinseltown’s exclusionary casting system that relegated Black actors to lesser, often demeaning roles as servants and slaves, if they appeared onscreen at all.
When the Academy Museum opened in September 2021, I pointed out that—along with displaying movie memorabilia such as Dorothy’s original ruby slippers from 1939’s The Wizard of Oz, the “Rosebud” sled from Orson Welles’ 1941 Citizen Kane and the mechanical shark from Steven Spielberg’s 1975 Jaws—with galleries devoted to Spike Lee, Oscar Micheaux, and more, the Academy seemed to be taking sincere steps towards making amends for a century-plus of motion picture prejudice and tropes.
But the breathtaking beauty and breadth of Regeneration: Black Cinema, 1898–1971 takes this aim to new levels. Indeed, the project is a work of film history and art that enhances our knowledge of the movie medium. The exposition exposes the cinematic scope of the Black contribution to and participation in (plus victimization by) the movie industry starting in 1898, with the first extant strip of celluloid depicting African Americans. Upon entering the gallery space the viewer encounters a screening of the Selig Polyscope Company’s vaudevillean Something Good–Negro Kiss, wherein a Black man and woman kiss, hug, and dance. Interestingly, the performers are far more passionate than their white counterparts in Thomas Edison’s 1896 The Kiss, the very first cinematic smooch.
Along the museum’s top exhibit floor, the arc of African American iconography onscreen from 1898–1971 swings from images of early “race films” to “soundies” (early MTV-like shorts featuring musicians) to luminaries such as Paul Robeson, Josephine Baker, Bill Robinson, Hattie McDaniel (her Oscar acceptance speech for 1939’s Gone with the Wind is screened), Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte, Pearl Bailey, Sidney Poitier, Ivan Dixon, Abbey Lincoln, and beyond. Lobby cards, Sammy Davis, Jr.’s costume as Sportin’ Life in Otto Preminger’s 1959 Porgy and Bess, a pair of the Nicholas Brothers’ tap shoes and many more iconic artifacts are lovingly displayed. But for this movie historian, what I most enjoyed were film clips from The Emperor Jones, Princesse Tam-Tam, Carmen Jones, etc.—which is as it should be at a movie museum.
On a more somber note, there is a staircase marked “Colored” leading towards an imaginary balcony where Black filmgoers were seated in many segregated theaters until after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The fact that Hattie McDaniel was seated separately and unequally at 1940’s Oscar ceremony where she picked up her golden statuette for portraying Mammy in Gone with the Wind is also noted.
With a major museum installation, book, and film series, Regeneration: Black Cinema, 1898–1971 may not rectify all the racist wrongs perpetrated by the motion picture industry, but to paraphrase the title of an Ava DuVernay film, it is certainly a movie milestone in ensuring that from now on, America “will see” Black people, on- and offscreen.