The Brooklyn Rail

Dr. Alyssa Lopez’s Reel Freedom: Black Film Culture in Early Twentieth-Century New York City questions the glaring omission of Black New Yorkers from the city’s earliest film histories. In her new book, Lopez “traces Black film culture in New York City from its origins in the early twentieth century to its firm establishment in the 1930s.”¹ Reel Freedom centers the existence of ordinary Black New Yorkers and their connection to the emerging medium, attending to the agency of Black moviegoers negotiating cinema and its surrounding institutions as part of their lives in New York City. This focus on Black New Yorkers’ engagement with cinema situates the local with the cultural, proffering an understanding of Black film culture as “a manifestation of Black placemaking efforts” in New York City. Through Reel Freedom, Lopez contributes to scholarship on understanding early twentieth-century Black New York that reckons with the impact of a new, developing technological medium and forms of mass leisure.

Rooted in archival research, Lopez’s book excavates a history of Black New Yorkers’ developing relationship with moviegoing that raises critical insight on how and where films were seen in New York City. Additionally, the book’s dedication to Black film culture moves beyond the impact of what was seen on the big screen: what other function(s) did movie theaters as public spaces afford to Black New Yorkers? How did some Black girls and women utilize moviegoing as a symbol of freedom? Were Black filmmakers like Oscar Micheaux able to negotiate with state censors to get their version of their films to Black audiences in New York City? How did labor union organizing impact Black projectionists’ ties to community and film institutions? And from where did Black film criticism emerge in early twentieth-century New York City? These questions are raised and explored throughout Reel Freedom, thus providing a cultural history of Black New Yorkers, who undoubtedly engaged with the popular medium in various capacities that impacted their communities and the ways they negotiated their stakes in New York City. The Brooklyn Rail sat down with Lopez to discuss Reel Freedom, and the ways in which she articulates Black film culture, how she centers ordinary Black New Yorkers throughout the book, and why attending to a history of moviegoing in the early twentieth-century matters for today.

Edward Mendez (Rail): Tell us about Reel Freedom.

Alyssa Lopez: Reel Freedom explores the development and establishment of Black film culture in New York City in the early twentieth century. The book moves from some of the earliest film showings in New York—like 1896–1905—to the Great Depression to focus on how Black New Yorkers were using seemingly disparate aspects of Black film culture to cultivate spaces for themselves, for placemaking and community building in New York City—a city that had non-discrimination laws on the books since the 1800s, but which in practice was incredibly discriminatory and exclusionary. At the turn of the century, as cinema became incredibly popular as a new, modern amusement, you saw Black New Yorkers getting at different aspects of film—not just filmmaking—to push back against their exclusion from this amusement and public city spaces. For me, Reel Freedom is a place-based book.

Rail: Can you define Black film culture for us? And why is Black film culture so important to placemaking in New York City?

Lopez: For me, Black film culture is not so much about the medium itself—I don’t really talk about film that much, and I don’t spend that much time with heavy film analysis. Instead, film culture is those interactions around cinema: the act of moviegoing, the act of being in the movie theater; labor, or hidden labor, in terms of projectionists (as people can’t see them, but they’re absolutely part of making film possible); film criticism; directors, specifically Oscar Micheaux and his interactions with censors. All these things surrounding the film text impact the film text (and vice versa) and have to do with place. One of the fears about film in the early twentieth century was its transportability: a text could leave New York, go to the South, then over to California, and all over, but arguably, there is something very specific about the local and the way a text is being received and how film operates in that space. New York was a fascinating place to look at this, because the little bit of scholarship on New York and film during this period was just about discrimination, like segregated seating. I was like, “That can’t possibly be the full story?” That is one aspect of it—one layer of Black film culture, if you will. But it’s a really shallow one. So I had to ask, “How else are Black New Yorkers using this medium and the institutions that make film possible to respond to racism and live their lives in the city?” One of the arguments I make in the book is that to live in New York in the early twentieth century is to be a filmgoer, in some ways—a new filmgoer!—exploring the medium and what it means for you, your community, and for your life. Place is bound up in how film comes into the city for Black New Yorkers and how they use the surrounding institutions to take it in. Something generally understood in Black film history is that Black film culture is entertainment and resistance—resistance to segregated seating, resistance to racist stereotypes, but also an embrace of the medium and the public spaces the medium is displayed in. There is a resistance in getting to live one’s life free and unfettered, with access to the amusements afforded to everyone else in the city.

Rail: Throughout the book, you frequently engage with material conditions and how ordinary people shape Black film culture. Can you say a little about this focus? Your chapter on Black projectionists stands out to me—skilled labor that goes unseen.

Lopez: The invisibility of projectionists’ labor today still remains so because much has been automated, but the projectionists’ union in New York is still fighting for recognition of their continued and evolving labor, despite the implementation of automation. For Black projectionists in the early twentieth-century, their framing of their argument is actually quite humble—“Yes, we are important to the industry and practice this skilled labor”—but also, not an infrequent amount of their framing is: “We literally want a union to survive. We want a livable wage.” And because of how much is published in the New York Amsterdam News about the projectionists at this time, they made their labor and lives visible.

There’s a few different ways that I explore how ordinary people—like some Black girls and women in the second chapter—literally use moviegoing as a way to be, like, “Yup, I live in New York City now. I want to live my life like this, my parents disagree with that, but I am still going to do what I want to do,” and using city space to navigate certain theaters and escape family trauma. There are many fascinating ways moviegoing and movie theaters figure into the constellation of some of these girls’ and women’s lives. It means something. I’m glad you use the term “material conditions.” Like, what does it literally mean to walk down 125th Street and decide which theater to go to? Why not this one? Who are you going with? What are you trying to see? Where do you live?

Rail: I noted in chapter two, when you say, “Black girls’ and women’s moviegoing practices were an extension of how they negotiated the ins and outs of living in the city.”² It made me think about hegemony and the constrictions on these girls and women through respectability politics. With this in mind, can Black film culture be transgressive? And is it?

Lopez: Yeah, in some ways. Like I mentioned, Black film culture is entertainment and resistance. It’s a tension. There needs to be this grappling with the question: is Black film culture—specifically relating to these Black girls’ and women’s moviegoing—one hundred percent transgressive, or is it them literally trying to live their lives? What’s the prism through which we analyze the Black experience? Is it only through the lens of racism and discrimination, or is it them literally trying to live as young, Black female migrants in New York? This chapter is really reliant on Cheryl Hicks’s work on Black female criminality in New York. Their bodies are literally policed. Whether or not they want to go down the street to the movies, they’re not thinking about the forces that monitor their existence—whether that is their parents, a police officer, or the police state—they are just trying to live their lives. I try to use the records to cull some of that out. Some girls are quite literally like, “I help my mom pay the bills, and yet I can’t spend my money like I want to, going to the movies and dances and clubs”—all those things that fit in the constellation of consumer culture of popular amusements in the early twentieth century are like, “No, I’m a laborer. I want to spend my money however I want to.” It was really fascinating to me how they were tying themselves to consumer culture and also, I’d argue, the burgeoning of dating culture, too. What is it to go on a date? Are you a prostitute if you go on a date to the movies and dinner and have sex? They’d say no, but some of their caretakers at Bedford Hills and the Women’s Prison Association would say, “Well…” You know? So these girls and women are negotiating that. It’s so clear in the records that they are pitted against the forces that be, who are saying, “You can’t have a good time because of the way that you look, and because I don’t want you to move through the city.” I think there was a recognition by some of these girls and women that what they were doing was transgressive. But they just wanted to be young girls in Manhattan in the early twentieth century and participate in that excitement. The dichotomy of putting forth entertainment, resistance, or transgressiveness and trying to live your life is a product of the sources I am using: literal prison records. The surveillance perspective is there, so trying to parse through what the girls and women are saying … LaKisha Michelle Simmons says something that I think I quote in the book: if you want to understand Black girls’ struggles, you also have to explore their joys.³

Rail: I didn’t want to raise this question—partly because I recognize the stakes in your research, and it is laid out quite clearly throughout the book—but readers might want to hear it from you directly: why does this work matter?

Lopez: There’s many reasons why it matters, and there is a simple answer to that: do we want to understand history or not? The value in studying Black film culture in the early twentieth century today is, if you want to understand why film is so important, you have to understand the culture around it when it was developed. My epilogue talks about how the Black film culture in chapters one through five is developed and in place by the time James Baldwin is a kid in Harlem. He’s living in a culture that is now cemented, but had been building up to what he’s experiencing up through the fifties. We can’t understand the importance of the medium itself unless we understand why people were going to the movies. Why you are going to the movies in 2025 might actually be quite similar to why you were going to the movies in 1915. Also, what film and film culture can do to bridge divides and build community—often in moments where that feels impossible, especially in alternative spaces—is really important, and I hope one of the takeaways for the book.

Rail: It is one of the takeaways! It’s very important and relevant to thinking about community today, especially in a place like New York City, with so many theaters that are part of various communities. Aside from the films themselves, what else did movie theaters have to offer?

Lopez: I argue that movie theaters are an alternative public space: somewhere to go if you were in a crowded tenement and just wanted to get out and be and exist, or just get off of the city street and escape. But it also exists as a place to commit crimes (which is true of any dark space, but especially movie theaters). People are close together in a darkened theater; people are moving around, getting up, and not staying for a full show. This made it easy to steal some purses, steal some coats. But also, it becomes a space for community building. Jacqueline Stewart talks about this—community as something like a band that impacts the audience interpreting and reinterpreting what’s on the screen. But I also talk about the theater as a space where lovers can, like, rub knees. Like, “Oh wait. Am I into this? I think I’m into this.” Like, sneak a moment of privacy. And also a moment of safety and potential refuge for sex workers, as opposed to being out on the street, which is significantly more dangerous. These kinds of activities make it so that the physical space of the theater gets cast as dangerous, immoral. There’s already a scare of the movies themselves being immoral, but following that you get this idea: “here is this clearly unsafe physical space where you might be solicited.”

Rail: In the second chapter you get the movie theaters as a public space used as not intended. The first chapter delves into how movie theaters were used by their community.

Lopez: There’s a communication and relationship between theater proprietors who want to appeal to Black moviegoers and the Black community who cooperate and work with theaters to have different organizations hold weekly meetings in theaters. You have theater managers putting on charity events for a range of organizations and causes as a way to appeal to different constituents, but also to get the support of Black community who is patronizing them. It’s a give and take relationship. ”Are you being discriminatory? Are you showing the kind of films this audience wants to see?”

Rail: The relationship between the film, movie theaters, and churches really stood out to me.

Lopez: It is not without accident that the first instances that I found of Black moviegoing and Black exhibition in the city were in a public park known for events put on by and for the community—Harlem River Park—and churches. That’s not by accident. Why are these alternative spaces needed? Most likely because of segregation and the city’s nickelodeons. I had trouble finding what churches were putting on. Most likely it was films with religious themes or more mainstream stuff restitched to adjust the message. But in Harlem River Park with Professor Simms—that’s local Black business showcasing recognizable faces in this new medium that’s celebrating community away from those limiting and segregating spaces. That’s not an accident.

Rail: You talk about the New York Age and Black film criticism. How do you see the journalist in the Age that you highlight as contributing to shaping Black film culture? Are their “protests” emblematic of Black New Yorkers spectating experiences?

Lopez: I pick Lester Walton and Vere E. Johns because they are the most prolific in the Age. The New York Amsterdam News gave Black film criticism as well, but I felt that these two authors in the Age were really in depth, and really got into what movie going was like and could be. And to be honest, they had a lot of criticisms. Neither one of them had any great faith in film at all. I enjoyed writing about them for that reason. To believe so deeply that this medium will never solve any problems in race relations but to still continue to write about it takes a lot of energy. And despite the lack of hope and trust and belief that it could be this progressive and useful medium, they still recognized its worth and its power. Lester Walton is one of if not the first Black film critics in the United States to talk about the medium. What these critics contribute to Black film culture is a discussion of the utility of the medium itself. I set this up in chapter five as the two things these writers talk about. First: What is the medium showing? How is it problematic, how is it not, and what could it be? And second: what is going on in New York, in New York’s theaters? Walton and Johns connect these two. These questions are not separate in their minds. That’s really important and gets at what I am talking about in the book overall. Really, what matters is film’s impact on people, on Black lives in New York. They’re also publicizing this discourse. They’re taking this incredibly intellectual discourse and putting it into this weekly and making it a public conversation. Both of them are really talking about “here’s the problem, here’s the impact on the local, here’s what we can do.” Whether or not those are always doable, it’s really important that they are taking that intellectual debate and having it in public, and saying “Here’s how you too can do this.”