Filmmaker's Journal: Notes on The Lincoln Film Conspiracy

• Published in: Black camera : the newsletter of the Black Film Center/Archives Vol. 5; no. 1; pp. 226 - 292
• Main Author: Archer, Ina Diane
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bloomington Indiana University Press 01.09.2013
• Subjects: Actors; African Americans; Archives & records; Conspiracy; Creativity; Documentary films; Film history; Film preservation; Installation art; Metaphor; Motion pictures; Narratives; Plasticity; Science fiction & fantasy
• DOI: 10.2979/blackcamera.5.1.226
• ISSN: 1536-3155

[...]films flourished during the technological transitions of the late 1920s and early 1930s as technicians and artists experimented with new creative methods like synchronized sound and two-strip Technicolor, and I wondered how these innovations related to the social situation of African Americans. In his published remarks, Jafa theorizes that the hand-cranked camera, which gives the flicker to silent film, was more appropriate to capturing the expressive form or "plasticity (much like a talking drum)" of human motion-of black motion. The line "What happens to a dream deferred?" provides a central metaphor in my narrative, linking rotting combustible film to deferred dreams, suppressed black expression, and negative cinematic depictions, which can lead ultimately to cultural destruction.5 The Lincoln Film Conspiracy was originally planned as both a thirtyminute film and a six-minute multiscreen installation that would use an imaginary narrative to address the potential loss of orphaned and minority artifacts from film history, film preservation, and from the archive. [...]my unfinished project from 1991, La Tete Sans Corps / The Head without a Body, about the discovery, reanimation and exploitation of a young black woman's disembodied head, is a sci-fi story that has been revived as a Lincoln Film Conspiracy horror/romance and for which I crafted a series of lobby cards modeled on those of the Reol Film company (fig. 2).6 The project archives my emotional world as well; consequently the production has ebbed, flowed, gone on tangents, hesitated, and restarted.