Of the many streaming series currently available online, MoMA's Film Vault Summer Camp is certainly one of the most invaluable, providing insights into both the restoration and curation process behind the historic films of its storied collection. Taking place every Thursday in August, the series aims to provide access to the museum's Film Library, which was started in 1935, and the research that sustains it.
Each week of the Film Vault Summer Camp (presented by collection specialist Ashley Swinnerton) is programmed according to a new theme. Week two, entitled Preservation, offered an in-depth glimpse into the history of film restoration and MoMA's own restoration procedures in the case of three historic selections: a 1934 screen test of Katherine Hepburn as Joan of Arc, Andy Warhol's Kiss (1963-1964), and Lime Kiln Club Field Day (1914/2014), the oldest surviving feature film starring an all-Black cast. Never completed in its time, Lime Kiln Club Field Day was produced by the Biograph Studio and acquired by MoMA in the form of "seven cans of unedited daily rushes." New digital technologies allowed the museum's curator Ron Magliozzi and preservation officer Peter Williamson to conduct a thorough investigation and study of the film's structure and plot so as to complete it in 2014, 101 years after the film's production.
In an overview of the film's restoration process for Sight & Sound, critic Ashley Clark describes Lime Kiln Club Field Day as a "a precious visual depiction of middle-class black characters from an era when lynchings and racial stereotypes were rife." The film's rushes, from which its completed form was sculpted by Magliozzi's team, depicts cast and crew, both Black and white, "mingling" on set. At the center of the film, is the popular Black comedian and performer Bert Williams, so famous that the project was at one point deemed "Bert Williams Lime Kiln Club Field Day." As a note, MoMA points out that Williams was "among a number of leading Black performers who appeared wearing blackface onstage at the turn of the century." In his interview with Clark, Magliozzi provides further clarification to this complex history: “The fact that the [Williams] wore blackface allowed the rest of the cast not to wear blackface before white audiences.” (Clark points out, however, that Williams was still criticized for his participation in art which reinforced negative racial stereotypes.) In this episode of Film Vault Summer Camp, the MoMA team also emphasizes that a wonderful result of the rediscovery of Lime Kiln Club Field Day is the emergence of a re-interrogation and reclamation of it by contemporary African-American filmmakers such as Garrett Bradley and Ramell Ross.