Cinema’s Peculiar Institution is a history of the representation of slavery in film from the dawn of cinema to the present. It is the first systematic study of slavery’s on-screen depiction. My study, by contrast, maps the deployment of these depictions over time by deeply mining many film history archives and conducting interviews to explore the production politics and censorship and deeply examining press sources to document the reception of cinematic images of slavery.
The project explores and catalogs not only obvious images of slavery but also oblique references to it and planned yet unmade film properties that treat it. The project is, in many senses, an intellectual history of slavery’s screen imaginary. The project aims to document and interpret the various imaginings—and attempted imaginings—of slavery and its aftermath as a part of the broader history of race and labor in America. The short-term aim is to complete the film database and a portion of the continuing research for the project. The long-term aim is to complete the book and an outward-facing web resource to introduce the public and researchers to the subject in a narrative framework and through database access. Based on rigorous archival research of sources, including studio records and Production Code Administration files, this project explores the evolution of systems of censorship and patterns of representability that shaped the image of slavery on screen, focusing most extensively on the Classical Hollywood period, a time of intensifying civil rights struggle.