May 20th @ 6:20 SHARP! FILM FORUM
HERE WE COME!!
SMASH YOUR BAGGAGE!
HAROLD & FAYARD!!
THE FABULOUS CORA LaREDD!!
NINA MAE & BABE!
Artist and archivist, Ina Archer, presents early sound shorts starring Black artists, mostly filmed at Brooklyn’s Vitaphone studios, including Yamercraw: A Negro Rhapsody (1929); An All-Colored Vaudeville Show (1935), with the Nicholas Brothers; Gjon Mili’s jazz film masterpiece Jammin’ the Blues (1944); and Duke Ellington, Noble Sissle & Eubie Blake, Nina Mae McKinney, Ethel Waters, Cab Calloway, and many more. Dedicated to Ron Hutchinson (see A TRIBUTE TO RON HUTCHINSON on May 28.)
Ina Diane Archer is a Media Conservation and Digitization Assistant at The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture. She is a filmmaker, visual artist, programmer and writer whose multimedia works and films have been shown nationally. She is the former co-chair of New York Women in Film and Television’s Women’s Film Preservation Fund. Prior to joining NMAAHC, Ina was on faculty at Parsons The New School for Design. Ina earned a BFA in Film/Video from RISD and a Master’s in Cinema Studies at NYU focusing on race, preservation, technology, and early sound film. But her real cinema education happened in the Film Forum theaters where she spent her formative years eating popcorn and drinking mint tea.
Excerpt: White folks call it madness but we call it Hi De Ho: “All Colored” Vitaphone
The Vitaphone Studios, a division of Warner Bros, located in Brooklyn, NY was a prolific producer of short films during the transition to sound starting as early as 1926. Vitaphone technology was a sound-on-disk process where audio was recorded separately onto wax records during filming and synchronized mechanically with the projected footage. The 16” disks rotated at 331/3 rpms and played for approximately 7 to 9 minutes running in sync with a 35mm image marked “picture start”. The disk was synchronized by cueing the stylus marker on the central groove of the disks. Initially, the records could not be edited resulting in the stagey, one take style of the early films. However, the Vitaphone synchronization of sound and picture and the short format made it a technology ideally suited to show off live acts.
Between 1929 and 1936, The Vitaphone studio, using talent from nearby Broadway and the vaudeville circuits, made scores of “Varieties” and “Brevities” films. Over this time the shorts developed from 9 minute one reelers recording musical and novelty acts with simple proscenium staging, to two reels, that were twenty minute semi-integrated musicals with narrative scenarios framing the numbers. The films, many of which were preserved by UCLA, are a record of popular entertainment of the period and they include many ethnic and black themed acts (including, famously, Al Jolson’s pre-Jazz Singer short A Plantation Act), blackface and black-voiced minstrel shows, as well as all black- cast shorts subjects.
In this program we will enjoy Vitaphone films featuring African-American performers drawn from the stage, revues and clubs like the dance corps from Smalls Paradise, bandleaders such as Eubie Blake; lesser known figures like drummer Freddie Crump and The Norman Thomas Quintette, and recognizable faces like the supernaturally talented child, Sammy Davis, Jr., and later, Cab Calloway. Ina Archer 2014
FREDDIE
CRUMP!
*SEE YOU THERE*