This is an installment in a multi- part series.
Film history has a long and messy timeline. With the ease of tossing aside older movies from eras of silence and black and white, holes easily pop up. Lead Outreach and Engagement Librarian Elizabeth Riordan noticed this while going through the University of Iowa’s own collection. Riordan shares insight on the history of Black films by zeroing in on a lobby card for a 1920s film kept in the UI archives.
The Daily Iowan: What is a lobby card?
Riordan: A lobby card is what you would send to studios or the studio’s theaters to get them to check out your film. I just love the language they use, how they’re trying to get you to come to the theater. They want you to buy into this film.
What collection is this lobby card and others like it from?
This is from our Black Film and Television collection that we started a few years ago. We started it because we realized we had a huge gap in a lot of our film collections. We have a huge film collection because we’ve had a lot of really cool people come to the UI and then have gone on to make films. FilmScene is always advertising the latest ones. That’s all history here at the UI. With this gap, our curator Peter Balestrieri and I decided we could fill this gap a little bit. We started buying things that had to do with race films. This lobby card is for a movie called ‘Flying Ace.’
What is a race film?
Race films were movies predominantly made for Black audiences. They were done with an all Black cast and made until the ‘50s. Richard E. Norman, a white movie director and the founder of Norman Studios, usually directed them.
He made films for African Americans because he would say how we’re ignoring this complete audience, and we shouldn’t be.
What was the movie advertised on this card/poster about?
‘Flying Ace’ is one of the earliest films in our collection that we talk about. ‘Flying Ace’ was a silent drama in 1926. It was based on Bessie Coleman, or that’s what they say, and it was filmed in Jacksonville, Florida. It’s also about flying aces in World War I. That was a really popular topic at the time. It joined the Library of Congress Film Registry in 2021, so it’s now preserved forever in the Library of Congress, which is really great.
There was a lot of equipment used like planes. They also used a lot of locals for the film. I think that’s really exciting because it was also a really smart tactic to get a bunch of people from the area to go see it.
What I love about the film is it’s one of the few that remains from Norman Studios. A lot of these films are lost, but this one actually still exists.
The lobby card also is mentioning other films that are coming out by Norman Studios, some of which we have in this collection.
Who was Bessie Coleman?
Bessie Coleman was a Black and Native American female aviator. She did a lot of work. She became the first Black woman and the first Native American to earn an aviation pilot’s license. I think we always hear about Amelia Earhart, and Bessie doesn’t quite get enough accolades. But, more and more people are starting to talk about her now. She died in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1926. Bessie had been talking to Norman Studios about making this film, but she died in a plane crash before it came out.
Were there other kinds of race films that were targeted to other groups besides African Americans?
You do get a few when you get to the silent era. There were Japanese and Chinese studios in California at the time. They were making films that starred an all Asian American cast. So, race films can mean other communities as well. When we hear the term “race films” though, it’s typically talked about in the context of Black Americans.