![]() This past fall, nine years after releasing a report detailing the paltry survival rate of silent films in general and productions by black filmmakers in particular, the Library of Congress announced that scholars had identified the earliest known footage produced by a black film company, a fifteen-second sequence from The Trooper of Troop K (1916), embedded in a copy of a different film from the archive’s holdings. Speculation, reversed chronology, counternarratives, assembly, disassembly, reassembly: the tools available to black artists, and especially experimental black artists, are said to arise from a fundamental lack, which is why it can feel so disorienting when the institutions that house public records declare that they have made an internal discovery. The best we can do is use our imaginations-reinvent the archive, or remix it, or dream a new one into existence. Never mind if those totems have been stolen, or purposefully misclassified, or turned into collectors’ items and sold for profit. For those of us whose ancestral totems are conspicuously missing from the public archives that are meant to preserve collective history, nothing, we are told, can be done. ![]() ![]() Cultural relics, once lost, are generally assumed to be lost forever, which is perhaps why they are so often said to be lost “to time”-as if the objects themselves had come face-to-face with eternity and chosen to dissipate.
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