Preserving African-American Cinema: The Case of The Emperor Jones (1933)

Discovering Black Film History: Tracing the Tyler, Texas Black Film Collection

“…When re-inserting censored scenes that most original audiences did not see (as in the restoration of The Emperor Jones [Dudley Murphy, 1933] featuring Paul Robeson), or creating "historical reconstructions" from surviving footage (as in the restoration of Marian Anderson: The Lincoln Memorial Concert [Hearst Metrotone Newsreel, 1939]), or copying a film onto a different gauge (as in the "35mm blow-up restoration" of independent 16mm classic Killer of Sheep [Charles Burnett, 1977]), this work requires making aesthetic and his-torical judgments about what viewers want -or deserve -to see. 16 In his attempt to outline an ethical and theoretical framework for making such judgments, Andreas Busche describes the considerable interpretive power that film restorers wield, in that "[a] restoration might affect our understanding of an object or the cultural identity of a group of people." Busche goes on to say that "[a]stute awareness of the ethical implications of their work keeps practitioners from making decisions that could compromise quality or even cast the profession in a negative light.…”