This Digital Archivist Believes Hollywood’s ‘Competition Era’ Is Over

In Hollywood, the present is the future is the past.

Twin strikes shut down production for six months last year, and with its workforce still on ice, the entertainment industry has been slow to recover. Domestic box-office revenue is expected to be 30 percent lower this year compared to 2019. By 2028, cable TV subscriptions are estimated to decline by 10 million. And with the looming acquisition of Paramount Global by Skydance Media, the future of Hollywood is as it ever was: reliably uncertain. As one studio executive described it to the Los Angeles Times, it’s “something of an existential question mark.”

Of course, this isn’t Hollywood’s first—or second or third, for that matter—financial reckoning. “When we look closely at history, we realize that all the negotiations we have to make about character, about financing, about representation and all these things have been asked before,” says Maya Cade. “Ego tells us that we must be the first, but why would we want that to be true?”

This, in part, was Cade’s mission when she launched Black Film Archive in 2021, at a “moment when people were demanding the full totality of our lives to be represented in media, they felt as if Black Film could not hold the capacity for Blackness.” Cade knew better. So she got to work and built a database of Black cinema titles that included everything, spanning diverse, obscure, and well-known films. A former audience development strategist at the Criterion Collection, she says people were missing a larger context to the issues at hand. The archive, which celebrated its third anniversary this August, features more than 300 films released between 1898 to 1999, with each title available to stream online.

Anxious to learn more, I reached out to Cade to help make sense of what’s happening in Hollywood. Over the phone from Los Angeles, where she recently relocated, Cade and I talked about the work she does with Black Film Archive, the future of the movie business, the grave implications of the Internet Archive lawsuit, and how we can better preserve history on an internet that likes to forget.

Jason Parham: Is it true that the idea for Black Film Archive sprung from a conversation on Twitter?

Maya Cade: I was on Twitter in June 2020, and I saw a lot of people talking about how racist or dramatic Black Films are as a way to dismiss them. So instead of shaming people for that opinion, in my mind I was like, OK, how do I make an offering for people to discuss that belief, to contrast that belief, and also move us past it. I don’t want to dismiss the truth because it’s harsh. And I know there are many ways to get to the truth. I also don’t want to dismiss people who feel that way. But I want to offer another lens of how they’re seeing it. Because when we talk about Black films as only being traumatic, we’re reducing the art form in a very minuscule kind of way. This idea of like, oh, “All these films are about slavery. All of these films are about trauma porn.”

Which, of course, isn’t true.

I did the calculations of how many films are about slavery—and they were quite few across time. But I understand that at the same time, what does it mean when a white decision maker wants to see Black people in a specific way? They have the power of how we’re told in media. I also understand that film becomes the dominant narrative of how history is told. So there are multiple truths to contend with. But I think we’re better prepared to contend with those things when we have a full look of what Black film’s history can offer.