Film Forum

Artist and archivist Ina Archer presents early sound shorts starring Black artists, mostly filmed at Brooklyn’s Vitaphone studios, including Yamercraw: A Negro Rhapsody (1929); An All-Colored Vaudeville Show (1935), with the Nicholas Brothers; Gjon Mili’s jazz film masterpiece Jammin’ the Blues (1944); and Duke Ellington, Noble Sissle & Eubie Blake, Nina Mae McKinney, Ethel Waters, Cab Calloway, and many more. Dedicated to Ron Hutchinson (see A TRIBUTE TO RON HUTCHINSON on May 28.)

Ina Diane Archer is a Media Conservation and Digitization Assistant at The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture. She is a filmmaker, visual artist, programmer and writer whose multimedia works and films have been shown nationally. She is the former co-chair of New York Women in Film and Television’s Women’s Film Preservation Fund. Prior to joining NMAAHC, Ina was on faculty at Parsons The New School for Design. Ina earned a BFA in Film/Video from RISD and a Master’s in Cinema Studies at NYU focusing on race, preservation, technology, and early sound film. But her real cinema education happened in the Film Forum theaters where she spent her formative years eating popcorn and drinking mint tea.

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