Recontextualizing a Lost Film: The Big City (1928), A Study in Contrasts
Estimates suggest that more than 80% of Hollywood feature films from the silent era are considered “lost.” Despite being made and finished, most lost films have been unseen for generations. Janet Bergstrom’s audiovisual essay Murnau’s 4 Devils: Traces of a Lost Film (2003) suggests both a medium and a methodology for addressing the gaps which lost films have left in the historical record. Acknowledging the limitations of language alone, our proposed contribution will consist primarily of an audiovisual essay about The Big City (Tod Browning, 1928), a lost film which reminds us of significant elisions in the history of Hollywood cinema concerning people of color. What disappeared in a 1967 vault fire along with the last known print of The Big City was a precious record of the many African-American performers who appeared as employees and patrons of The Black Bottom, the fictional Harlem nightclub constructed on an MGM backlot for the shooting of the film. Unlike Rick Schmidlin’s 2002 “reconstruction” of another lost Browning film, London After Midnight (1927), which uses production stills and reconstituted intertitles to approximate the narrative of a non-extant cult classic, our audiovisual essay does not attempt to fill the void with a continuous story. Instead, we use its loss as a point-of-departure for exploring the specific Jazz Age dance and music contexts the film would have invoked for 1928 audiences, while lingering on the disappearance of the screen images of a number of African-American actors and dancers whose Hollywood film appearances were few.
Unmade, Unfinished, Unseen: Shadow Histories of Cinema and Television 