Chapter 16 - Zora Neale Hurston, Film, and Ethnography

Summary

The films shot by Zora Neale Hurston during her anthropological research trip through the US South (1927–1930) were perhaps the first professional recordings ever made by an African American woman. Durkin examines this footage to explore Hurston’s contributions to ethnographic cinema and to black southern cinema more broadly, and to elucidate some of the connections between her anthropological and creative work. The films show how Hurston understood and sought to depict black folk cultures on the page and stage. They draw attention to the international focus of her research and suggest that the textual and cinematic strands of her research project should not be read in isolation because they were conceived as a joint corrective to mainstream US distortions of black artistry. Moreover, the films are rare cinematic documents of the everyday lives of black working-class subjects whose artistry underpinned so much of Hurston’s creative work and interwar US culture more generally.