Illustration by CD-ROM Developer, Owen Mundy, and Assistant Project Director, Jenny Barker Phyllis Klotman, founder of the IU Black Film Archive and a professor emerita of Afro-American studies, is the producer of the CD-ROM featuring an interactive, searchable database that contains more than 3,300 movies emphasizing the contributions of African Americans to cinematic art. (below) The IU Digital Library Program has unveiled a new digital collection of 14,500 color images taken by IU alumnus Charles Weever Cushman that documents a 30-year cross-section of American and international life. The print collection is housed at the IU Archives. San Francisco, Calif., 1962 Chicago, Ill., 1949 Portland, Ore., 1938

Taken by amateur photographer and IU alumnus Charles Weever Cushman between 1938 and 1969, the DLP images document an amazing cross-section of American and international subjects, from inner-city storefronts and industrial landscapes to candid portraits and botanical studies. The collection is part of the IU Archives.

The Kodachrome slides add color to an era primarily recorded in black and white—“a world that we had long since resigned ourselves to viewing only in shades of gray,” wrote Eric Sandweiss, IU’s Carmony Associate Professor of history, in an essay included on the collection’s Web site. “In Cushman’s work,” he observed, “the past becomes, for an instant, impossibly present.”  

Deteriorating colors in some of the slides, however, led IU’s image specialists to consult with experts at the University of Basel in Switzerland, who have researched fading patterns of film dyes. Technicians there re-created mathematically what the dyes on the slide might have looked like at the time of processing and used this information to generate color-corrected versions of nearly 250 of Cushman’s images.

Viewers may search the collection or browse the images by year, location, subject and genre, a task possible only because Cushman, who graduated from IU in 1917, recorded notes about the thousands of images he shot during more than three decades.  

“We would never have undertaken this project without Mr. Cushman’s detailed recordkeeping,” said Kristine Brancolini, DLP director.“We used his notebooks, which have been digitized and linked to the photographs, to create a rich descriptive database and sophisticated searching.”

In 1972, Cushman bequeathed to IU the notebooks, some of his photographic equipment and his entire collection of photographs, neatly packed and labeled in suitcases. The slides were rediscovered by a university archivist in late 1999.

Brancolini said she hopes the collection will reach a national audience of social historians, scholars of vernacular photography, historic preservationists and the general public.

“While one takes pleasure in examining these handsome images singly,” Sandweiss concludes in his essay, “the greatest reward comes from assembling them as a group and discovering in their totality a clearer picture of a place that we thought we knew: the United States, c. 1938-1969, a place close enough to touch, but forever just out of reach.”

http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/cushman/index.jsp

Phyllis Klotman, founder of the IU Black Film Archive and a professor emerita of Afro-American studies, is the producer of the CD-ROM from the University of Illinois Press; it features an interactive, searchable database that contains more than 3,300 movies emphasizing the contributions of African Americans to cinematic art.

Essay topics focus on film directors and actors, genres and companies, early silent films, Chicago origins, The Birth of a Nation, The Birth of a Race, minstrelsy, segregation at the movies, the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, Oscar Micheaux, the Norman black-cast films, Paul Robeson, animated shorts, black women in film and behind the camera, musicals, black gangster films, Spencer Williams and Sidney Poitier. Among the scholars providing the essays, in addition to Klotman, are Jacqueline Bobo, Thomas Cripps, Jane Gaines, Charles Musser, Charlene Regester, Mark A. Reid, Henry Sampson, Adrienne Lanier Seward, Michele Wallace and Gladstone Yearwood.

The CD is accompanied by a 32-page instructor’s guide, which contains suggested classroom exercises as well as user instructions.

Black film studies lends itself readily to historical inquiry regarding such issues as enterprise, representation and race relations, and African Americans in Cinema: The First Half Century visually demonstrates these connections by organizing historical data into four chronological periods that reflect landmarks in the history of the country and/or the history of cinema: “1894-1914, Emerging Images;” “1915-1928, Bold Beginnings;” “1929-1940, Hollywood Beckons;” and “1941-1950, End of an Era.”

The CD-ROM also contains hundreds of photographs, posters, production stills and film clips, as well as voice-over introductions that help contextualize the first half century of black cinema.

Klotman is the author of Another Man Gone: The Black Runner in Contemporary Afro-American Literature and the editor of Screenplays of the African American Experience, Struggles for Representation: African American Film and Video and Humanities through the Black Experience.

Editor’s note: “Imaging Blackness, 1915–2002: Film Posters from the Black Film Center/Archive” continues through Sunday, Dec. 21, at the IU Art Museum in Bloomington.