Acts of Love: Black Performance and the Kiss That Changed Film History

In 2017, an archivist at the University of Southern California discovered a nitrate print of a forgotten early ragtime-era film that revises notions of Black representation in early American cinema. This rigorous history from Field (Uplift Cinema), an associate professor of cinema at the University of Chicago, unpacks the significance of the film, Something Good—Negro Kiss, which depicts a young Black man and woman, played by actors Saint Suttle and Gertie Brown, “joyously embracing,” and represents a departure from 19th-century film, which relegated Black actors to demeaning roles as racist caricatures or comic buffoons. The newly discovered film, made by William Selig in 1898, was not a mockery of Black courtship for the benefit of “white gawkers,” according to the author, but a “media savvy” play on the first onscreen kiss, filmed in 1896 between John C. Rice and May Irwin, a well-known white minstrel actress. In remaking the Rice-Irwin film with Black actors, Something Good implicitly mocked Irwin’s “racial masquerade,” calling out “minstrelsy’s grotesque fantasies of blackness” while speaking to Black humanity, romance, and desire. In the face of a sparse historical record, Field performs impressive sleuthing to detail the film’s production, distribution, and historical context, while also exploring remakes by contemporary filmmakers in such shorts as 2020’s Glenville. The result is a nuanced study that expands notions of Black representation in early American film. (Feb.)