Nothing but a fantasy

Courtesy Christopher Rothko “Mark Rothko: From the Inside Out”

In 2017, American film researchers recovered “Something Good – Negro Kiss,” a short film depicting a playful kiss between a Black couple which had not seen the light of day for more than a century. A long-forgotten artifact from the earliest years of American film, the sweet, humanizing vignette, produced by the Selig Polyscope Company, makes a startling contrast to the overwhelmingly racist and blackface-ridden contempory portrayals of African Americans. Four years later in 2021, archivists in Norway, halfway across the world, identified a sister short in their collections—an extended alternate cut which reveals more of Chicago stage performers Gertie Brown and Saint Suttle’s vaudeville-like routine, a theatrical, hot-and-cold romantic dynamic between two lovers which parodies the popular and controversial short “The Kiss” (1896). Both films, which had previously been lost, were known from entries in old motion picture catalogs but had been assumed to be era-typical, anti-Black “race films” until their rediscovery in the 21st century. Together with its more famous sibling, which has since been inducted into the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry, this alternate version of “Something Good” represents the first-known instance of Black intimacy ever captured on-screen.