Camille Forbes's new book on early black pop musician/actor/comedian Bert Williams is finally out on the stands, and today MoMA did a showing of Williams films to go with the book (and Feb. MoMA talk). The three films, Fish, A Natural Born Gambler, and fragments of a third romantic narrative were in amazing high quality - so much so that it was eerie to watch them, as Williams appears in blackface in all three (as he always did, even when everyone else in the film is not in blackface) but the resolution was such that the films could have been from some much more recent past. 

A Natural Born Gambler (above - the whole film is on YouTube) unfolds in a bar scene in which Williams tries to hustle an out-of-town high roller out of cash, only to get arrested with the whole lot of folks and thrown in jail. In the end, it is the judge who gets the spoils and Williams who goes slightly mad sitting in his cell, giving a pretext for him to do his famous "poker scene," where he mimes an entire poker game.

Of them all, the fragments of the third caught me the most since, as mostly b-roll, it showed a continous and non-narrative stream of folks play-acting a country fair, riding an old fashioned carousel (not like the gingerbread Amusement park German ones, the more rustic travelling fair types), cakewalking and generally just hanging out. What struck me is that the background – urban, homes and lots – looked so much like an present-tense Mid-Atlantic suburban neighborhood with big rambling box houses against matte sky. Willams and his sweetheart just sat on the carousel talking while the camera gazed. It was perhaps more surreal to think of this as a potentially more verite moment more than a performance. Forbes contends that no one knew the "real" Williams, but this moment felt different than the highly focused energy he put into his close-ups and action sequences.