The Archive of Absence: Speculative Film History and Early African American Cinema

While African Americans produced films starting around 1909, no prints or fragments survive prior to 1920. This cinematic absence—a lost decade—is a great challenge for Black visual historiography, but also offers an opportunity for a more flexible and imaginative reconstruction of Black filmmaking practices, something that a number of contemporary Black artists have taken advantage of. This talk considers how a speculative archive can be mobilized not only to give form to what’s absent but also to create the visual material anew.