Phoebe Huang
Pronouns: she/her
Research Mentor(s): Matthew Solomon, Associate Professor
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Film, Television, and Media, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts
Presentation Date: Thursday, April 22, 2021
Session: Session 2 (11am – 11:50am)
Breakout Room: Room 1
Presenter: 3
Abstract
Hollywood has a long history of lost films- features that were completed and released in theaters, but of which no surviving copies remain. These films only exist through advertisements, photographs, and articles, and have to be pieced together in order to understand their impact on the industry at the time. This study investigates one of the most famous lost films, The Big City (dir. Tod Browning, 1928), by combing through archival databases of hundreds of articles from historical Hollywood and African American newspapers in order to identify the dozens of unknown Black extras who appeared in the film. Matching names to faces and digging into Hollywood casting records and actors’ careers has revealed not only who many of the previously unidentified African American actors were, but that many of them went on to have successful careers, despite the film industry’s disregard for most non-white performers. Due to the inaccessibility of key archival resources due to the COVID-19 pandemic the research group focused their efforts on working with the few archival photographs that had already been digitized and made available in a high-resolution format. Team members gained proficiency in Adobe After Effects in order to create more dynamic, immersive, and engaging visualizations of the few surviving artifacts of The Big City. Existing scholarship in this area has a fairly standard visual idiom, but during our research we created new idioms and methods that have laid the groundwork for future lost films research and visualization.
Authors: Phoebe Huang, Zora Kwasnik, Matthew Solomon
Research Method: Creative Arts
