Labor of Love

Allyson Nadia Field discusses her new book’s exploration of hidden moments in Black film history and the rejuvenating contexts that expand their meaning.

By Robert DanielsMarch 28, 2026

• Film

• History

DR. ALLYSON NADIA FIELD first became acquainted with the rediscovered silent film Something Good – Negro Kiss in January 2017. In the introduction to her latest book, Acts of Love: Black Performance and the Kiss That Changed Film History (University of California Press, 2026), she recalls being in labor when she received an email from the moving-image archivist at the University of Southern California, Dino Everett, alerting her to the historical find. The email—which had the subject line “Tell me I am overreacting”—contained stills from the silent film, which Everett had acquired from a collector in New Orleans.

An associate professor of cinema and media studies at the University of Chicago, Field teaches and publishes on race and representation in interdisciplinary contexts. Her research includes an examination of preclassical African American filmmaking in Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity (Duke University Press, 2015) and the historical survey L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema (University of California Press, 2015), co-edited with Jan-Christopher Horak and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart. So when Field first saw Something Good – Negro Kiss, she immediately recognized the piece’s remarkable importance.

Filmed in 1898, Something Good – Negro Kiss is a fully extant 20-second piece featuring two Black, Chicago-based vaudeville performers—Saint Suttle and Gertie Brown—engaged in playful smooching. Viewers can see the pair communicating with someone off camera (most likely the film’s director, William Selig), but there are no intertitles to illuminate the filmed setting or situation. One can only watch and observe a rare instance of Black affection from the early days of cinema.

Within a year of the piece’s discovery, Field and Everett identified the film’s origins and participants, digitally restored it, and submitted it to the National Film Registry. The artifact garnered rapid virality when Netflix counsel Kyle Alex Brett shared the piece to Twitter, accompanied by Nicholas Brittel’s score (“Agape”) to Barry Jenkins’s James Baldwin adaptation If Beale Street Could Talk (2018). The powerful alchemy of sound and image inspired many online to fawn over what they perceived as documented Black love, intuiting an unmediated realism to Suttle and Brown’s staged performance.

With such widespread attention, questions arose about Something Good – Negro Kiss: Who were these actors? How did they find themselves in front of this camera? And what was the general backstory to this unique film? In her book, Field approaches these questions and more in an enlivening, meticulously researched investigation that gives voice to the history of Black performance in early cinema, the referential origins of this boundary-shifting artifact, and the lives of Suttle, Brown, and their troupe, The Rag-Time Four, known for popularizing a version of the cakewalk dance.

I spoke to Field about her book over Zoom in January, while she taught a University of Chicago study-abroad course in Paris.

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ROBERT DANIELS: When I heard about this book, I wondered how you were going to find enough material in a 20-second silent film to fulfill a book-length examination. When and why did you think that was possible?

ALLYSON NADIA FIELD: I didn’t begin the project thinking it was going to be a whole book. I knew this was important film history. But once we identified the film and actors and proposed it to the National Film Registry, Something Good – Negro Kiss took off so suddenly on social media. It had a real life of its own, which allowed me to see how it really touched people. That was exciting to me as a scholar of silent film. I thought, I get to talk about something that people care about. [Laughs.]

At the same time, that attention was a real challenge, because I had to check my impulse as a historian to correct people when they said, “The actors in the film are in love.” They’re not. These are performers. I wanted to emphasize and respect their skill and practice rather than treat it as a kind of home movie. After the film was inducted into the National Film Registry, there was a lot of media interest in it, particularly from a certain type of sound-bite media, and I would get the same kinds of questions. People were interested in the lives of the performers, what we know about them, their career trajectories, and other things that they might have done.

I realized that if this was going to be a book, it needed to be a book that people wanted to read, not the book that I necessarily would’ve written. It ended up being both, which I’m really pleased about, but I think the reason you can get a book out of these 20 seconds is that it’s about not only the film but also how we understand the film. It’s about what the film meant then, which requires historical analysis. It’s about the performers and their lives and the other things that they did, and about the vexed world of turn-of-the-century Black performance. It’s about the cakewalk. It’s about the way these forms traveled into cinema. And ultimately, Something Good – Negro Kiss tells us a lot about Black performance and how we understand representation now, even though it’s a story from a hundred years ago.

In the introduction, you write that “contemporary audiences seek images and histories that can serve as a usable past.” It seems like contemporary viewers have come to crave realism even in the fictional. Do you think that impulse informed why people approached this film as a kind of “home movie”?

I think that’s entirely tied to the fact that it went viral on social media at the exact same time that If Beale Street Could Talk came out. When people saw it, it was imbued with that sound, which I think underscored the poignancy and melancholy that people were also reading into the film. It also took off because it’s an image that seems unmediated, though we know, of course, that it’s actually highly mediated—the actors deliberately seem unbothered by the presence of the frontal camera.

The other piece is that we, as contemporary audiences, flinch when we see early cinema representations of Blackness, and for all the right reasons, because 99 percent of the time there are egregious images in them. But this film is so charming that it sort of reconditions us to consider that maybe silent cinema wasn’t exactly the way we think it was. Maybe there’s something there that’s unexpected. To have this film is very disarming to our initial impulse.

Between each chapter, you have interstices where you note the different regions the film played in—Indiana, Kansas, Texas, and Oklahoma. You use these locations to reconstruct the spectatorship and the reception to the film. Did this film give these two actors a chance to enter spaces that they weren’t otherwise physically afforded in that era?

To different degrees of reception—in some ways, [Saint Suttle and Gertie Brown] are smuggled in. In some ways, they’re abused. They’re also showing up in places that were hostile. Make no mistake, the film was certainly promoted, sold, and exhibited often within racist frameworks. They’re Black, they’re dancing, they’re performers—so it was meant to be a kind of humorous interlude. Their kissing is an object of ridicule. At the same time, it’s remarkable that, because of their performance and their disarming charm, they exceed those frames.

Even in the most virulently racist context that you can imagine, how that film was shown and to what kinds of audiences it was shown to, it might have had an impact on people, especially the crazy, racist white people who would’ve seen this. That a representation of humanity and a form of resistance was smuggled in is exciting, and what I wanted to do with those interstices is to trace all the places that I know it showed and to consider what it meant to have this film in this context in front of these people, even in a mixed-race theater.

You write about how Shuttle and Brown are clearly taking directions off camera in Something Good – Negro Kiss. Additionally, in the Rag-Time Four’s cakewalk film, actors John and Maud Brewster don’t understand how depth of field works—they’re in the background of a shot, preparing for their turn, while Suttle and Brown dance in the foreground. How does your book consider the evolution of performance?

I was trying to make sense of why their performance of the cakewalk looked so weird. In the 1897 Edison cakewalk film, the performers are in a line and there’s no depth of field. But here, they’re acting as if they’re on stage. For them, there was this learning process about range of motion and what the lens could capture in terms of who’s in the foreground and background. This was a very new medium that probably still seemed like a trick show to them. They, of course, would’ve seen movies before this. But the movies they would’ve seen would’ve been like the May Irwin Kiss or maybe actualities.

I thought it was interesting to think about what it would’ve meant for them to be in the studio and to be told by a director that you need to go here or there. One of the things that’s clear in their performance of the cakewalk is they try not to block each other. There are four of them, and even when two of them are in the background and two are in the foreground, they make space for each other. That offers us a chance to think about what their performance tells us about these short films and filmmaking at the time.

You chronicle the tension between what the film depicts and how it was presented and sold—in the Sears film catalog, for example. Why did you choose to get that granular about your research process?

There’s a ton of labor that goes into writing and excavating history. Sometimes it’s born out of solid evidence, sometimes it’s out of informed speculation, and sometimes it’s connecting fading dots. I wanted to be clear with the reader about what I knew, what I didn’t know, and why we don’t know certain things. A lot of folks don’t realize the total absence of film history. They don’t realize that 90 percent of early films are gone. The remarkable fact that any of these films survive is itself significant and a reminder of all the things we don’t know. I’d like to think this film is the tip of the iceberg of what could have been made but hasn’t survived or been rediscovered yet.

When you say that you’re sometimes trying to connect faded dots, I was wondering if you could talk about your approach to speculation. How do you balance what you know and what you’re intuiting?

The key thing about speculation for me, as a method and how I engage with it, is that it’s built on the foundation of deep historical research and collaborative information shared by archivists and librarians. It’s not Gertie Brown’s in love, and butterflies are in her stomach. For example, when we talk about them traveling as performers and how they went through these towns, we must ask about what we know. If we know they were in this town, then what do we know about that area? What do we know about how this town treated Black people after dark? What do we know about these circuits that these performers were on? What do we know about what it meant to travel at this time as a troupe? It’s important to use the archive as a starting place, a springboard, but not to be confined to it because we know it’s unreliable. It has more erasure than it has representations. So speculation is vital for me because otherwise, if you only write what is in the archive, then you’re just rewriting the violences and the erasure that have happened.

The book is broken down into timelines, with each chapter being a specific biography of each performer. I sense that Suttle was probably the hardest timeline to reconstruct considering that so much of his story, as you write, was filled with dashed dreams that didn’t allow him to reach the fame he probably wanted.

You picked up on something important: I started my research by trying to place these performers and performances, wherever I could, on various timelines. In some ways, Suttle was the hardest. I don’t want to call Gertie Brown a total success, but because of [vaudeville and future television star] Tim Moore, her husband, she intersected with the historical record in more overt ways than Suttle did. At the same time, Suttle does show up in fascinating ways in places that allowed me to think about other aspects of Black performance and Black lives in this period. He was a composer, and a lot of his sheet music survives. That’s another form of evidence of his skill, training, and musical chops. These pieces of evidence offer a way to tell a kind of alternate history of unknown Black performers.

I’d like to think they were stars, but this is really about the day-to-day film performers and the difficult slog they had. We underappreciate that most of the performance history we know is written from the perspective of those who became stars.

Considering you spoke about the tension between the original intent of the film upon its making versus how it was received online, what do you hope readers will take from your book?

I really hope they take several things: an appreciation of the skill and the lives of these performers, the idea that this film is a performance and that these are performers at work, and the notion that they should honor these incredible performers by recognizing their labor. In fact, this book was originally going to be called “Labor of Love.”

I also hope Something Good – Negro Kiss and its story show that there’s an untold narrative in film history—a history that I’d like to think I’ve now contributed to—that shows what could have been and what we are just coming to realize. This is a real story of resilience. It’s a story of resistance to the narrow view of Black people that film had circumscribed them to. As difficult a story as it is, it’s a really hopeful one.

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Allyson Nadia Field is an associate professor of cinema and media studies at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity (Duke University Press, 2015) and Acts of Love: Black Performance and the Kiss That Changed Film History (University of California Press, 2026). She is also co-editor with Jan-Christopher Horak and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart of L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema (University of California Press, 2015) and co-editor with Marsha Gordon of Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film (Duke University Press, 2019).