Zora Neale Hurston Fieldwork 1928 (RARE FOOTAGE)

CREDIT: Filmmaker: Zora Neale Hurston DESCRIPTION: Gabe Paoletti says: "In the 1910s, a writer from Mobile, Emma Langdon Roche, interviewed Cudjo for her book Historic Sketches of the South. Arthur Fauset, a writer and folklorist of the early 20th century, talked to Cudjo in 1925, where Cudjo relayed many of the animal stories of his culture’s oral tradition to Fauset. By then, Cudjo was the last survivor of the Clotilde, and the last person alive to have been brought to America from Africa as a slave. Fauset published these stories, as well as an account by Cudjo Lewis of hunting back home in Africa. However, his largest cultural impact arrived when he met pioneering American author and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston. She wrote and published articles about Cudjo's story, and took pictures and video of him.'" (http://bit.ly/2BVk1iB) EVEN MORE: SueSnellLives! says: "Better known for her (Zora Neale Hurston) work as a novelist, Zora Neale Hurston could be, according to an essay by Gloria Gibson, the first Black American woman filmmaker. The film footage, which includes Children’s Games (1928), Logging (1928), and Baptism (1929), appears to be from her work as a student of anthropology under the tutelage of famed anthropologist, professor and mentor, Dr. Franz Boas. A graduate of Barnard College and a Guggenheim fellow, Hurston traveled to back to a South similar to her hometown of Eatonville, Florida to capture a variety of short takes of Black American life. Ethnographic in nature, the films reflect a focus of folklorists of that time period who believed that '… cultural performance and beliefs must be expeditiously collected and documented because they would soon be gone forever' (Gibson, 205)."