Commandment Keeper Church, Beaufort South Carolina, May 1940

Zora Neale Hurston is a celebrated author (Their Eyes Were Watching God), playwright, poet, and a pioneering anthropologist who documented life in black communities in the American South and Caribbean diaspora. She was also one of the earliest ethnographic filmmakers--that is, filmmakers who use the camera to observe and document work, play, ritual, social practice, and other elements of daily life of its subjects without effort to shape or direct the action--and the first African-American to shoot ethnographic film footage. Hurston earned a degree in anthropology at Barnard College in 1928, where she was the sole black student at the time, and was mentored by Columbia University professor Franz Boas, a pioneering anthropologist who championed the use of film cameras in the field. Through the 1930 and 1940s, she traveled around the American South, the Caribbean, and South America to collect stories and study the folklore, customs, and social culture of black communities. Along with the published volumes of her research and findings (including the celebrated 1935 Mules and Men), she shot footage of the people and their lives. Hurston made a point to participate in the communities before turning the camera on them, to earn their trust as well as to learn what social activities were important to the people and representative of their lives. Among her films are recordings of children's games, workers in the fields, and religious practices and services. Commandment Keeper Church, Beaufort South Carolina, May 1940 (1940) is a 15-minute excerpt of field recording footage that observes religious services (including communal singing and revival-style sermons) in the Gullah community of the Sea Islands of South Carolina. Zora Neal Hurston was the filmmaker on a team that also included Norman Chalfin, who made field audio recordings of the events. The sound is not synchronized to the footage, due to the difficulty in accessing electricity on location. "There was no electric power," wrote Chaflin in notes preserved at the Library of Congress. "Illumination was from kerosene lamps." For a time the sound recordings were thought lost, but they have been reunited with the film footage and the accompanying soundtrack offers authentic recordings of the distinctive musical and vocal culture of the Gullah people and adds to the texture and atmosphere of the events photographed. The footage was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 2006 and this presentation mastered from 16mm film elements preserved in the Margaret Mead/South Pacific Ethnographic Archives Collection at The Library of Congress. Sources: Mules and Men, Zora Neale Hurston. Lippincott Publishers, 1935. Oscar Micheaux and his Circle, ed. Pearl Bowser, Jane Gaines and Charles Musser. Indiana University Press, 2001. "Librarian of Congress Adds 25 Films to National Film Registry," Sheryl Cannady. Library of Congress, December 20, 2005. "The Performative Visual Anthropology Films of Zora Neale Hurston," Elaine S. Charnov. Film Criticism, Allegheny College, 1998. "1940 Gullah documentary recognized," Ruth Ragland. The Florida Times-Union, February 20, 2006. By Sean Axmaker