Fieldwork Footage

Children's ring games, a baptism, a logging camp, and the people Zora Neale Hurston was talking to, looking back at her camera. She took a 16mm camera on her folklore collecting in Florida and Alabama in 1928, funded by Charlotte Osgood Mason and trained by Franz Boas, and she is not filming picturesque subjects; she is filming her sources. Among the surviving reels at the Library of Congress is the only moving image of Kossola, Cudjo Lewis, the last survivor of the Clotilda, whose story she recorded in Barracoon. A novelist and anthropologist with a camera, before either profession thought of asking her to use one.