Uplift Cinema

<div>In <i>Uplift Cinema</i> Allyson Nadia Field recovers the significant yet forgotten legacy of African American filmmaking in the 1910s. Like the racial uplift project this cinema emphasized economic self-sufficiency education and respectability as the keys to African American progress. Field discusses films made at the Tuskegee and Hampton Institutes to promote education as well as the controversial <i>The New Era</i> which was an antiracist response to D. W. Griffith's <i>The Birth of a Nation</i>. She also shows how Black filmmakers in New York and Chicago engaged with uplift through the promotion of Black modernity. Uplift cinema developed not just as a response to onscreen racism but constituted an original engagement with the new medium that has had a deep and lasting significance for African American cinema. Although none of these films survived Field's examination of archival film ephemera presents a method for studying lost films that opens up new frontiers for exploring early film culture.</div>