Yet, despite the obstacles of ignorant white people in positions of power, and all too slender marketing budgets for movies about people who were called negroes in the era in which the film was set, it’s obvious that the canon of Black American Cinema keeps growing larger. It ain’t the worst of times. Opportunities within the world of cinema—among both the image-conscious corporations that finance it at the studio level, and the non-profits whose artist development and investor cultivation efforts are devoted to the same Diversity, Equity and Inclusion principles one finds in liberal American institutions writ large—have increased rapidly for well connected, code-switch trained black professionals, and the occasional working class interloper, too. This “Black Excellence Industrial Complex,” as some cynical observers have coined the systems at play in the current moment, has yielded enhanced employment opportunities for some talented and some very mediocre executives, artists, and craftspeople, several wonderful motion pictures, and many trifling ones, too. Few if any of these people, save perhaps Alana Mayo at Orion Pictures, the studio that released Till, have greenlight authority though.

What we mean, though, when we say “Black American Cinema” is as slippery, hard to pin down and open to interpretation as ever. Generally, we know it when we see it. No one I have encountered in this all-too-quick life is uncomfortable thinking of, say, Do the Right Thing (1989) or Daughters of the Dust (1991) as representative of the term. Uniquely African American subject matter married to the voice of an African American artist—key boxes checked regardless of where the money came from, what the ethnic make-up of the rest of the crew was, what ethos all these elements were brought together by. It’s when one of those two at the top isn’t checked that the ambiguity begins.

Topsy and Eva (1927), which Metrograph will screen accompanied by a live score as part of a series I have curated of eclectic, unusual, underseen “black” movies titled Strange Fruit, is the most extreme example of this conundrum I have encountered. The movie is a sight gag– and minstrelsy-fueled adaptation of the popular vaudeville show, which itself was a reimagining of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, then and now the most filmed American novel, although no one has dared try since the late 1980s. It focuses on two relatively minor characters in the book, and was helmed by the Canadian Del Lord, best known for directing dozens of Three Stooges shorts—Booby Dupes (1945) is a favorite—in the ’30s and ’40s. The Step Brothers (2008) of its time, the movie is a freewheeling and highly offensive comedy in which a majority of its black characters, including the titular Topsy, are played by white performers in blackface.

However, Noble Johnson—who became the first black contract player in studio history when he signed a deal at Universal at some point between the years 1917 and 1920—co-stars as Uncle Tom, a role which he largely plays straight against Rosetta Duncan, shucking and jiving her way through an interpretation of what it’s like to be an enslaved black child as Topsy. Her real-life sister Vivian plays Eva, the doomed white child in the novel who is saved by and finds fellowship with Tom due to their shared Christian faith.

There are multiple layers of tragedy in embedded in this production, both on-screen and off, which are well worth unpacking. I came across the film, the only existent feature in which Johnson plays an African American character, while researching a television show about Noble Johnson and his brother, George, that the production company I am president of is developing. A successful star and producer of so-called “race movies” under the banner of the Lincoln Motion Picture Company that he started with George in 1916, Noble eventually swore off their avowed mission of making films about black people that eschewed the dominant minstrel stereotypes—Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks, per the iconic 1973 Donald Bogle book of the same name—in order to be an ethnically ambiguous bit player within the nascent Universal machine, causing him to fall out, at least temporarily, with his brother, who continued producing race movies until 1921.

George insisted they remain self-sufficient and only take black financing for their pictures, such as The Realization of a Negro’s Ambition (1916) or The Trooper of Troop K (1917), both of which were seen widely by black audiences at the time, and are now, along with the rest of the Lincoln catalogue, seemingly lost for good. But Lincoln did take on white financing for its last picture, By Right of Birth (1921), an ambitious production that failed to recoup and ultimately sunk the endeavor. By this time Universal, having taken away the company’s box office draw three years before (as part of his deal with the studio, Johnson’s name and likeness could no longer appear on the promotional material for any of Lincoln movies), knew that black audiences would happily turn out for white studio pictures in which Johnson was featured as something other than black. Johnson’s undeniable popularity within black America ironically hastened the fall of his own fledgling black production company, which his new employers understood to be a threat.

I wonder what George thought of Topsy and Eva. It was made at United Artists—which, unlike Universal, the studio that forced Noble to step down from Lincoln in 1918, was seemingly willing to let him play a negro and put him in the advertising as such; he appears in many lobby cards for the film that exist to this day, opposite the Duncan sisters. United Artists was also the studio co-founded by Noble’s Intolerance (1916) collaborator D.W. Griffith, then on the downside of his infamous career, who filled in for Lord to direct several scenes of Topsy and Eva. In the film, Noble plays a black character for the first time since his exiting Lincoln. That he does so opposite whites in blackface embodying some of the crudest stereotypes about blacks in a narrative that both ridicules and maintains nostalgia for chattel slavery feels like a surreal twist of the knife.