![]() ![]() The version of “Something Good” that has been circulating online has been edited to have soaring sound-“Agape,” a track from Nicholas Britell’s score to Barry Jenkins’s new adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel “ If Beale Street Could Talk,” about a young black man and woman who are in love in a difficult country in the nineteen-seventies. Watching it, I want to let my guard down and enjoy the lovely wildness of the couple, whose hips seem drawn close by some law more ungovernable than set direction. This recovered footage, by contrast, shows a moment of uncomplicated attraction between black people, with no trace of prank or meanness or midnight-colored paint. ![]() American film, mirroring the stratifications of American society, evolved to distort the sexuality of black men and women, either neutering it entirely or grotesquely overstating it. In this sense, “Something Good” reveals a secret, alternative cinematic history. The scholar Allyson Nadia Field, who is doing the heroic work of studying the silent era of black film, dates the work to 1898, suggesting that it was intended as a remake of Thomas Edison’s “The Kiss,” which is believed to depict the very first kiss on film. A lost pair of lovers were recently rediscovered in a thirty-second silent film titled “ Something Good – Negro Kiss.” The footage, which has been newly added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, shows a series of embraces between two black performers, Saint Suttle and Gertie Brown. ![]()
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