This looks great!
From the Black Film Center/Archive:
The Black Film Center/Archive has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities 2013 Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant to support the program, “Representing Early Black Film Artifacts as Material Evidence in Digital Contexts.”
In November 2013, BFC/A Archivist Brian Graney and Director Michael T. Martin will convene an interdisciplinary group of scholars, moving image archivists, and library professionals for a two-day conference and workshop to discuss the new methodologies and questions emerging through recent scholarship in early black-audience film studies and their broader application to other marginalized media cultures with rich histories of material practice.
Of the hundreds of black-audience films produced since 1905—most notably by Oscar Micheaux—only a small percentage of original film prints are known to exist. Those that survive are found in fragmentary form or in markedly different versions. In a 2011 article in Film History, Jacqueline Stewart proposed a challenging new avenue for this area of study by identifying unmined evidentiary value in what “we can learn from the singularity of each print…and what any existing print might teach us about the circulation, exhibition, and content of movies in this under-documented film culture. Indeed, when we think of each print as a unique artifact, we are encouraged to reconsider what we think of as a film’s ‘content.’”
Read the rest of it, and learn about the upcoming conference and keynote presentation HERE.