Lila MacLellan/QUARTZY
The earliest surviving film to depict African-American actors in an intimate moment made its online debut to modern audiences last month—on social media, of course. Viewers found the 29-second silent film, Something Good — Negro Kiss, made in 1898, deeply moving.
“The restored film opens on a couple with lips locked in a kiss,” Quartz’s Ashley Rodriguez wrote, describing the short piece. “The lovers pull back, smiling and swinging their arms, and then embrace and kiss again.”Because of its historical significance, the film was added to the US Library of Congress National Film Registry on Dec. 12. Then, a few days later, a Twitter user set the film to music from If Beale Street Could Talk, a movie released in December about a black couple in 1970s Harlem, by director Barry Jenkins. That tribute went viral. Even Jenkins, who also directed the Oscar-winning Moonlight, was rendered speechless.
It seemed like a happy ending for the cultural artifact, but the feelings the film has generated are complicated, says Allyson Field, a University of Chicago professor of film studies and one of the scholars who researched Something Good. The full story behind the work, and what’s known of its history, is dramatic and bittersweet.
A hidden jewel for sale on eBay
Something Good’s second life began in 2014, when Dino Everett, a film archivist at University of Southern California, bought a collection of vintage films for sale on eBay. At the time, he wasn’t looking for anything as fantastic and significant as Something Good. He was merely drawn to an image in the listing that led him to believe an early Thomas Edison film might be in the mix. So he sent $45.82 to someone named “Sheisolderthanme,” he explained to an audience at the Orphan Films symposium in New York last spring. Sheisoldethanme claimed that the films belonged to the estate of a collector in Louisiana, but the grouping was so random that Everett says he doubts they belonged to one person.
How “The Kiss” was cloned
It would have been basically impossible for either one of the scholars to have identified this film without the other’s expertise, says Field. “Films then weren’t packaged the way they are now, with titles or a list of the cast. There was nothing, no information on it. Every process took a lot of detective work,” she recalls, “which was a lot of fun.”
Both scholars immediately recognized their mystery film as a knock-off of what was once the most famous movie in entertainment, an 1896 film called The Kiss, directed by Edison. That work, one of the first films to be projected publicly, and thought to be the first to portray a couple flirting and kissing on film, had electrified and scandalized audiences in what has been called “the first act of collective voyeurism.” It was such a moneymaker that it was cloned repeatedly, with several directors adding their own flourishes or comedic spins.
Multiple layers of racial coding
Something Good, for all its tenderness and sincerity, was sold as a comedy, says Field. “It was really framed and marketed as a comedy because of the presumption that black people on screen were inherently comedic,” she says.But the racial coding in the movie is ”complex and multilayered,” she adds. The Kiss, the original, starred a white actress named May Irwin, and was inspired by a popular musical comedy for the stage, also starring Irwin, in which she kissed the actor John Rice. Thomas Edison had seen the play and promptly turned its pivotal moment into a movie, hiring the same stage actors for his project.
As Fields noted at the film symposium, that musical comedy was itself a burlesque on an earlier play that had featured an actress of Mediterranean ancestry. Her ethnicity had made the stage kissing, then considered lewd, permissible, not only for her, says Field, but by extension for the white actress who would imitate her.
What’s happened since
Field doesn’t know when African American love appeared on film in the years following Something Good’s release. There were a few mainstream films that were less aggressively racist, and that did portray African Americans in a positive light, Field explains, but she has found no record of anything like the restored film’s sweet moment.
The next reference she can find to an intimate moment that’s not hyper-sexualized is in 1945, when Vincente Minnelli makes The Clock, starring Judy Garland. In that film, a final scene of couples saying goodbye to each other as the husbands marched off to the war includes an African-American couple that also kiss farewell. It’s nothing but a little peck, says Field, but that was enough to warrant headlines in a black newspaper.
She saw one person comment that she’d been watching the film on a loop and crying, “because they seem so happy and I feel so angry.” That person wondered what people did with Suttle and Brown’s happiness 100 years ago.“What was electric for me about it was the through line, the connectivity,” Barry Jenkins told a reporter who asked him about the 30-second treasure. ”We always talk about generational trauma, but what about generational joy? Generational love? That’s what I found in the video.”
The list of films added to the National Film Registry on December 12th includes more famous titles such as Brokeback Mountain (2005), Jurassic Park (1993), Cinderella (1950) and The Shining (1980.) Something Good lands at the bottom, only because the list was organized alphabetically, yet that placement seems fitting for this film’s invincible spirit.