STG Presents Trader Joe’s Silent Movie Mondays: Silent Treasures Series – Lime Kiln Club Field Day at The Paramount Theatre on Monday, February 22, 2016.

General admission seating. Tickets are $10 (not including fees): http://bit.ly/1Nm396Q

Pre-film lessons and performance of the Cakewalk dance by Spectrum Dance Theater performers. Film introduction by Ron Magliozzi from MoMA. Silent film short A Natural Born Gambler (1916), starring Broadway comic and singer Bert Williams, precedes the feature. CineClub discussion follows the main film (see below for details).

Lime Kiln Club Field Day, starring Bert Williams and Odessa Warren Grey, is a silent black and white film produced in 1913 that is believed to be the oldest surviving film to feature black actors. Led by the famous Caribbean American musical theatre performer and recording artist Bert Williams, the cast involved Harlem-based entertainment pioneers Sam Lucas, J. Leubrie Hill, Emma Reed, Billy Harper and theatre performers from J. Leubrie Hill’s Darktown Follies stage company.

Biograph Co. produced the film, which was shot at locations in New York as well as New Jersey using a 35mm camera at 19fps. After the film recorded over an hour of footage, the producers abandoned the project during post-production leaving the film to be without a title and locked away by the Biograph Film Studio–until The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) discovered seven reels in their film vaults 100 years later.

In 2014, the film was deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant,” by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

Preserved by The Museum of Modern Art with support from The Lillian Gish Trust for Film Preservation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Celeste Bartos Fund for Film Preservation.

CineClub discussion to be held in the theatre directly following the film. Guests include: Ron Magliozzi, Associate Curator from the Department of Film of The Museum of Modern Art, Donald Byrd, Artistic Director of Spectrum Dance Theater, Dr. Louis Chude-Sokei, University of Washington Professor and author of the book on Bert Williams, The Last “Darky.” Vivian Phillips, STG’s Director of Marketing & Communications, moderates the discussion.