Conference panel discusses Black Film Center/Archive collection
Archivist Brian Graney and assistant professor Cara Caddoo participated in a panel presentation, “Documenting Early African American Cinema,” at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’s Film Librarianship in the 21st Century conference.
Caddoo moderated the discussion. Graney, who is associate director and senior archivist at The Media School’s Black Film Center/Archive, served as a panelist, along with Peggy Alexander and Marika Cifor of the University of California Los Angeles. The discussion focused on the archiving of race films, a genre of films from the late 1910s to through the mid-1950s produced for an African-American audience with an African-American cast.
While few of these films are left today, the Black Film Center/Archive and the UCLA Library Special Collections have two major collections of race film documentation. the panelists discussed these collections and a new project to build a comprehensive database of race film documentation. The panel took place April 26 in Los Angeles.