The wonderful Internet Archive has made public “Five excerpts from footage taken by author Zora Neale Hurston doing anthropological documentation of the South.”
We see people chopping wood, building a railway, sitting around the house, dancing in a school playground, and getting baptized. Not much to go on, especially without any sound or commentary, but still great to have it freely available online!
This silent, black and white footage runs about 6 minutes and is a 15MB Mpeg 4 download.
Get it here.
Here is a full list of Zora Neale Hurston materials at the Library of Congress.
(via Steve Rhodes’s del.icio.us feed)
UPDATE: Seems as if these materials were pulled from the web for copyright violation. Too bad.
This work was first screened publicly at a symposium I organize:
http://www.sc.edu/filmsymposium/archive/orphans2002/program.html#thursday
Kathy, thanks for the link! Are any of those papers available online? It would be great to have access to them along with the film.