Indiana University professor unearths earliest footage by Black film company from 1916

People can watch what the Library of Congress has just now affirmed to be the earliest surviving footage from a Black film company. This short clip was hidden in plain sight for years until it was recently identified by Indiana University professor and film historian Cara Caddoo.

"Somehow all of us have just kind of missed it all of these years," Caddoo said.

This discovery offers a rare glimpse at Black cinematography during the early 1900s, which is also known as Hollywood’s foundational “Silent Age.”

"African Americans were making films way back in the beginning of the Hollywood era, but since so many are lost, a lot of that history was forgotten,” Caddoo noted.

With expertise in mass media and African American history, Caddoo has published historical accounts of early Black cinema in addition to working extensively with IU's Black Film Center and Archive.

The discovery was initially made in 2021 when Caddoo was working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through her research into early film actor Noble Johnson, she had been delving into his short-lived yet very influential film studio Lincoln Motion Picture Co.

The scant remnants of Lincoln's filmography played on screen as Caddoo began taking diligent notes. The surviving footage — only four and a half minute clip — was believed to be from the studio's last feature, "By Right of Birth." The 1921 film follows a young woman learning she is a descendant of a former slave who belonged to a member of the Muscogee nation.

Caddoo estimates she must have seen this footage hundreds of times. But that day, she started noticing something was amiss. At the footage's halfway mark, there's a jarring shift. One intertitle, a card that transcribes a character's dialogue, looked completely different than the other ones before it. The content of the scene itself, which features a woman and man talking about a soldier's letter, did not fit in the 1921 film's known narrative. Moreover, these particular actors weren't even credited as having worked on this film at all.

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All of these differences hadn't raised an eyebrow on their own. But all stacked together, the revelation crystallized in Caddoo's mind: This clip wasn't from "By Right of Birth."

“I didn't really believe it. I was kind of in disbelief,” Caddoo said.

The elation of that discovery soon bled into further confusion. After all, if that 15-second scene wasn't from the 1921 film, where did it originate?

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A lot of early Black-produced films from the silent era have been lost, leaving glaring gaps of record in cinema studies. Over the decades, film historians have been able to painstakingly piece together much of that history, revealing a thriving film subgenre at the very onset of Hollywood’s foundation.

Early to mid-1900s films featuring predominantly Black casts and geared toward Black and mixed-race audiences were called “race films." Many of these movies weren't screened in an actual theater, given strict segregation laws at the time. Instead, Black Americans turned their own community spaces — such as schools, churches and lodges — into makeshift theaters for screenings. But this history is still too often untold.

“People in academia and in popular culture, they kind of forgot that that had happened. So when people talk about early Black film history, they're like, ‘Oh, the 1970s and Blaxploitation.’ They kind of forget that there's this much earlier history because of the fact that so many of those films are lost,” Caddoo said.

A producer of such films was the Lincoln Motion Picture Co., often credited as the first Black film company in the United States to have national film distribution. The studio was founded by brothers George Perry and Noble Johnson. A prolific actor in Hollywood, Johnson is considered by many to be the first Black movie star with appearances in classic films such as "King Kong" (1933) and "The Mummy" (1932). He's also a pioneer of Black cinema, as Lincoln Motion Picture Co. produced some of the first widely distributed films featuring African American actors in serious, realistic roles instead of racist caricatures.

Between 1916 to 1922, the company made five feature films and two newsreels. Most of Lincoln's work is considered lost media, which isn't uncommon for that era of film. As noted in a 2013 study commissioned by the Library of Congress' National Film Preservation Board, about 75% of American silent features have not survived due to the easily degradable film material that movies were made with. Since African American films were not given the same amount of value or attention by film historians, an even smaller number of race films were properly preserved and subsequently recoverable.

Earliest surviving clip of Black film company's work was hidden in plain sight

Caddoo recalled playing the clip back over and over, a sense of bewilderment dawning on her. She’s watched the footage probably hundreds of times before this moment. Though she believed she had known the footage down to the minute detail, she was now looking at it through a new set of eyes.

"I was like, 'How could I possibly have missed that?'” Caddoo said.

It was the clip's dialogue intertitle that first struck her as odd and ill-fitting. Unlike the intertitles in the rest of the clip, featuring plain white lettering against a black background, this card was highly stylized with images of cacti surrounding it. This scene also featured an image of a soldier, which doesn't fit within the narrative of "By Right of Birth." But that's pretty much all of the clues that this 15 seconds of footage afforded to Caddoo.

Luckily, it was just enough for her to develop a hunch.

Due to her familiarity with Lincoln's filmography, Caddoo knew the company's other features, such as one of its earliest productions titled "The Trooper of Troop K." The 1916 war drama depicts a man (played by Noble Johnson) undergoing a transformative journey throughout his Army service and eventually capturing the heart of a young woman back home. The film is set against the backdrop of the Battle of Carrizal, a then-recent military excursion between U.S. and Mexican troops leading to several Black soldiers’ deaths in the line of duty. At the time of its release, this film gained quick notoriety due to the political climate over the United States, which was just on the heels of formally entering World War I.

"The film became this kind of symbol and point of celebration for how important Black Americans were in protecting the nation and how much the United States relied on African Americans," Caddoo explained.

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The cacti intertitle, also known as a title card, and Johnson's appearance as a soldier were obvious clues linking back to "The Trooper of Troop K."

"Everything about the clips seem to be a reference to, or the way that people describe, this film, but the problem was nobody had a copy of the 1916 film," Caddoo said. “It was trying to figure out what something maybe was from when you don't even know what the original looks like."

Caddoo soon found herself on a mission to verify her theory. She eventually gained access to records from one of the men involved in Lincoln — about 70 banker-sized boxes worth of papers.

"I had to go through it all and just keep digging, digging, because I was like, 'There's something familiar there,'" Caddoo said.

Eventually, she found a copy of a brochure for "The Trooper of Troop K" showing the characters wearing the same costumes and standing in front of the house depicted in that clip. She shared what she had with Allyson Nadia Field, an associate professor at the University of Chicago, who agreed with her theory.

Prior to this, the earliest recovered footage of Black cinema was from the 1920s. Predating that production by four years, this clip is also notable for being the only recovered clip of Johnson in a Lincoln production.

Though this is just a snapshot of early Black filmmaking, it shows off the sheer artistry and creativity. In this clip, the filmmakers utilized an early special effect by superimposing Johnson's character into the scene with the two other actors. In the context of the narrative, Johnson's love interest was imagining what Johnson was doing while she read his letter.

"I think it's just really important to remind us that African Americans were part of film history from the very beginning. They were creative and innovative and they made really good films. This is a beautiful film. If you look at the clip, it's gorgeous.”

There's still lingering questions surrounding the footage, such as why it was inter-spliced between scenes from "By Right of Birth."

“That's still a mystery. I have no idea. I mean, I have different scenarios that are possibilities, but you know, there really is just so much more for us to learn about Black films," Caddoo said.

One of those possibilities was Lincoln cutting the "The Trooper of Troop K" scene into "By Right of Birth" as a cost-saving measure during production. This was a common practice in early Hollywood.

"We have so few Black films from this era. We don't really have a lot of records of Black film companies doing it, but they had more limited resources, right? They couldn't get loans from banks and stuff like Hollywood could. So the assumption is that of course they would do this," Caddoo reasoned. "It’s shoestring filmmaking.”

While unraveling these unknown elements may be a long process, at least film historians now have a thread to start pulling at.

"There's also just so many mysteries there that we can find some of the answers to — like who donated this film? That might help us to figure out why it would have had this other clip in it, like whether that was intentional or unintentional," Caddoo said.

The scene has been verified and archived by the Library of Congress and will subsequently be analyzed by Caddoo’s contemporaries. Caddoo hopes this discovery offers a nugget of hope to film historians that early Black cinema isn't totally lost or can only be captured in written records or second-hand accounts. Sometimes, it can still be consumed as intended: right on the silver screen.

“For me, personally, it kind of inspires me to just keep going because there's just so much more out there that's waiting for us to find,” Caddoo said.

Rachel Smith covers Indiana University and student life for The Herald-Times. Reach her at rksmith@heraldt.com or on Twitter @RachelSmithNews.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: Indiana University prof discovers 1916 footage by Black film company