Bert Williams: Lime Kiln Club Field Day (1913)
Three suitors court the same young woman during a Black social club's outdoor field day, with the games, dances, and rivalry built around comedian Bert Williams. The footage was shot in 1913 but never edited or released.
Rediscovered in the vaults of the Museum of Modern Art and identified in 2014, this is the earliest surviving footage from a feature-length film with an all-Black cast, and the only known moving images of the great vaudevillian Bert Williams performing without blackface. It was added to the National Film Registry the same year.
Background
Bert Williams: Lime Kiln Club Field Day was shot in 1913 by Edwin Middleton and T. Hayes Hunter as an all-Black production built around Bert Williams, the leading Black comedian of the vaudeville stage. The footage was never edited or released, and it sat unseen for decades before it was rediscovered in the Museum of Modern Art’s film holdings. It is among the earliest surviving feature-length films with an all-Black cast, and it was added to the National Film Registry. The story centers on a Black social club’s outdoor field day and a rivalry for one young woman.
What to watch for
Watch the club’s games, dances and courtship, which give the film its energy and record a Black social world rarely captured on film at that time. Williams is the reason the footage matters, since his comic timing built his reputation on stage and the rivalry is organized around his character. The surviving material is unfinished and fragmentary in places, a reminder of how much early film of Black performers was lost or never assembled into finished works, and of why this reel is treated as an important archival find.
