A charming little brick bungalow in College Park hardly seems a likely place for a video release hailed as the most significant in cinema history to come together.
But the unassuming home near Barrett Park, where Bret Wood lives with his wife and teenage son, is where he assembled the box set “Pioneers of African-American Cinema.” The five-disc collection’s July release prompted New York Times critic J. Hoberman to write: “From the perspective of cinema history — and American history, for that matter — there has never been a more significant video release.”
It’s just one critical hosanna among many for the set, which has been lauded for the way it illuminates a previously unacknowledged but monumentally significant thread of film history.
“I’ve always liked films that were apart from the Hollywood establishment,” said Wood, a locally based filmmaker, producer and restorer who works for Kino Lorber. “I feel like they’ve never really had their story told the way the Hollywood studios have. It’s terrain that hasn’t been thoroughly covered. … We knew it was the right time for something like this. Culturally, it’s time to celebrate the black filmmakers of the past who didn’t get any appreciation in their time.”
The idea for the set first came together when George Schmalz, a former employee of Kino Lorber who now works for Kickstarter, approached his former company about the possibility of using Kickstarter to fund film restoration projects. Wood said Kino liked the idea, and, after considering several possibilities, moved forward with films by African-American directors of the silent and early sound film eras.
“It was important that it not just be a collection of films, that it be an educational tool,” Wood said.
To that end, Kino brought on Yale film historian Charles Musser to help curate the project. Musser suggested Jacqueline Stewart, a professor at the University of Chicago Media Studies Department who specializes in African-American cinema, as a co-curator. Wood also had worked before with Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky, on the scores of several silent films and thought the musician would help bring an interesting perspective as another curator, and as a creator of scores for several of the silent films.
Kino’s Kickstarter campaign met with enormous success. With a goal of $35,000, the fundraiser ended up pulling in $53,000, with the bulk of the contributions coming from those giving $100 for a copy of the set on its release. “That allowed us to expand the collection, and the booklet became an 80-page little book,” Wood said. He said he was surprised at “the degree that people seemed to like to be a part of it.”
Wood and the curators worked together to come up with a list of films to include in the set, searching through collections in film archives, including those at Southern Methodist University, the Library of Congress, the Museum of Modern Art and even the brand-new Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture.
“They provided films for us and two essays in our booklet,” Wood said. “We’re probably among the first people to access material from them, because we did it before they even opened.”
Once the films were selected and the funding raised, Wood ordered digital masters of the films on hard drive from the archives. “I take that and do clean-up,” Wood said of the work he did on two computers in his upstairs home office. “I remove bad frames, paint out big chunks of debris, do color balance, even if it’s a black and white movie, make the contrast look balanced and consistent.”
Knowing what to correct and what to leave in is, Wood said, the crux of restoration aesthetics. “I err on the side of leaving it more as it is. Some people want their videos completely clean. But I feel like a movie should have a certain amount of texture. The films I release are maybe a little ‘dirtier’ than others.”
Either way, it’s a long, arduous and often lonesome process. “I don’t get any water cooler conversation,” Wood said. “I spend a lot of time on Facebook when I need to take a break. I love working at home, because I have an instant commute. It’s also a drag, because I’ll be up there at 10 at night, racing to get to the 10:15 FedEx drop-off up the road.”
The films ultimately included in the collection originally were created entirely outside of the Hollywood studio system. The filmmakers tended to live and work in pockets of urban African-American culture, such as Chicago, New York and Philadelphia, and their films were shown to black audiences at segregated theaters, or in other contexts, such as religious films screened in churches. In all, the collection totals about 20 hours of film, including features, shorts and documentaries from filmmakers such as Oscar Micheaux, Spencer Williams, Zora Neale Hurston and James and Eloyce Gist.
Although the typical films Wood restores for Kino Lorber might be reviewed somewhere like an esoteric blog, the release of “Pioneers” was met with quite a bit of interest. There were theatrical screenings at New York’s prestigious Film Forum and stellar reviews in major publications like the Times and the Guardian. The films will be available on Netflix next year, some will be broadcast on European television, and the collection has been licensed by the British Film Institute for release in the U.K.
Because “Pioneers of African-American Cinema” did so well, Kino Lorber has decided to continue with the series, launching a Kickstarter campaign for “Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers.” The Wood-helmed set, which will focus on women directors in the Hollywood studio system of the silent film era, tentatively is set to be released in late 2017 or early 2018. Wood said he’s also interested in compiling a box set of underappreciated Yiddish films after that.
