Hollywood shuffle: The history and impact of Maya Cade’s black film archive

In December of 2018, the short film Something Good – Negro Kiss (1898), featuring the first known on-screen kiss between two Black actors (Saint Shuttle and Gertie Brown), directed by Black film director and Selig Polyscope Company owner William Selig, was recovered, restored, and added to the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry. Before its discovery, Something Good’s legacy remained threatened by what Claudy Op Den Kamp thus encapsulates in their book The Greatest Films Never Seen: “if [films] cannot be seen, it will become increasingly hard to remember them” (12). Two years after Something Good’s restoration and exhibition, the Library of Congress scholar-in-residence Maya Cade launched the revolutionary Black Film Archive, a living register of national and international Black films made from 1915 to 1979 (now 1898 to 1989) that exhibit and celebrate “the rich, abundant history of Black cinema”. The site itself promises in its mission statement to uplift and make known “historically and culturally significant films [...] about Black people accessible through a streaming guide with cultural context”. This paper examines the placement and impact of Maya Cade’s Black Film Archive within the larger discourse of film history and film historiography.