The Fall 2024, Volume 94 edition of The Velvet Light Trap opens with the article, “Help: Afram and Black Capitalism” by Will Hair. The essay provides a formal and historiographic unpacking of Help, a 1970 ABC television production about Afram, a manufacturing company that was managed and staffed by African Americans in Asheville, North Carolina. The following blog post outlines the author’s initial discovery of the film within the collections at the Wisconsin Historical Society Archives as well as the larger research process behind the publication.
Will Hair
During my first semester of graduate studies in the Cinema Studies department at New York University in Fall 2022, I had a formative experience taking a class titled Film History / Historiography. Taught by the founder and director of the biennial Orphans Film Symposium, Professor Dan Streible, the course, though straightforward in name, was uniquely framed by the instructor’s abiding interests in neglected, nontheatrical, and non-extant moving images. Each week, my peers and I were instructed in theoretical considerations of historiography and practical research methodologies and shown material that had been de-centered by the field’s traditional emphasis on narrative feature filmmaking. Notably, our key text was Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film, an increasingly seminal collection of revisionist historiography edited by Allyson Nadia Field and Marsha Gordon. By the time our final research proposal loomed, I was hooked on the fact that some of moving image culture’s most vital objects and perspectives have been buried under the weight of a white, cis, male, and commercially oriented canon. Worthy alternatives have always coincided with hegemonic histories, I learned, and are still ripe for re-visitation if one knows where, and how, to look.
I aimed to center my research around themes of race and place. More specifically, as a native North Carolinian, I had long thought of the American South as a region marginalized by film and media studies and entered into grad school with the intention of shifting this imbalance. Further, as a lifelong Southerner and inspired by the essays in Screening Race, I knew that nonwhite perspectives were essential to the origin and makeup of the American South yet were largely under-served by mainstream narratives.
While still in the earliest stages of research and without any specific objects to lean on, I broadly began searching a combination of terms that tied race with place, such as “African-American” and “North Carolina,” into databases. As my search was quite open-ended at this point, WorldCat, a resource that aggregates collections of libraries from across the globe, proved to be an excellent starting point. By searching the aforementioned terms and limiting the results to audiovisual formats, I came across a variety of newsreels, television productions, and oral histories across a wide range of years. The description of a film listed as Now.Help struck me. Dated 1970 and published by ABC, the production was set in Asheville, NC, the mountain town I lived in prior to moving to NYC, and followed the business venture Afram, a manufacturing company totally managed and staffed by African Americans. Intrigued by the locale and subject matter, I followed the WorldCat link to the source of the holding, the Wisconsin Historical Society Archives. The online UW Madison Libraries catalog listed Now.Help as only available for access in-person as a single reel, 16mm print. Undeterred, I inquired about the film and was connected with WCFTR Film Archivist, Amanda Smith, who graciously agreed to digitize the print for me. Following a swift turnaround, I was provided a link to view it.
My first viewing of the digitization immediately answered a few basic, factual questions. For instance, a voiceover introduction from reporter Bob Farmer clarifies the curious title. The thirty-minute television documentary, simply titled Help, was a single episode of a larger ABC series called NOW, which covered a range of topics relating to “the people and events shaping our lives and times.” Possessing an admittedly naive degree of hope that I had rediscovered a forgotten work of clear social acuity and/or formal innovation, my first viewing of Help also yielded mixed feelings. On one hand, the film suffers from middling politics and a conservative form typical of network television of the period. Hinted at by its title, this involves a white savior narrative that lends much credit to a single executive, Robert Mathison, for getting the Afram venture off the ground. On the other hand, Help offers representation and a degree of agency to the Black community of Asheville and, perhaps even more importantly, encourages a level of active spectatorship through its discourses on labor, race, and the concept of “Black capitalism.” As the film lingered in my mind, I decided it was worth deeper consideration and further investigation.
Help was listed as part of a larger collection, “The Ernest Pendrell Papers, 1959-1976,” held by the Wisconsin Historical Society Archives. Ernest Pendrell was the director of Help and, I soon found out, a relatively prolific writer, director, and producer of television and theater for decades. The collection at WCFTR contained material relating to much of his output. A detailed finding aid made navigation of the collection quick and painless. After tracking down materials directly relating to Help, Mary K. Huelsbeck, the Assistant Director at WCFTR, generously provided access to the requested paper materials through digital scans. Once received, these materials, which included contemporaneous production notes, correspondence, and transcripts, became the backbone of my project.
Information gleaned from the “Pendrell Papers” furnished fascinating insights into the people and larger sociopolitical climate that fueled Help. In particular, I became invested in the evident impetus for ABC to use Afram and Help as a local case study of Black capitalism at work. Though there’s no explicit mention of politics in the film, two years prior to Asheville’s economic “experiment,” Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign heavily promoted a Black capitalism initiative as a remedy to racial tensions of the 1960s. Equally employed as an alternative to radical politics as it was a pitch to prospective African American voters, the initiative coincided with network television’s shift from civil rights programming to issues concerning Black Power. As Nixon’s ideas surrounding Black capitalism were positing an incentive to move away from the notion of “burn, baby, burn,” Help shifted from Black Power programming with a message to “build, baby build.” It’s this backdrop that the “Pendrell Papers” pointed me towards and which I began to further uncover through additional primary and secondary sources.
For local insight, I frequently visited newspapers.com. The site allowed me to see that Asheville-Citizen Times followed Afram, reported as the largest manufacturing firm of its kind in the country, from its inception to its eventual demise in the mid-1970s. Buncombe County Special Collections also had a rich collection of archival photographs related to the project. A variety of secondary sources, from economic analyses of Black capitalism to manuscripts on Black Power television, bolstered my understanding of the larger contexts that Help existed within.
As I unraveled these intertwined bits of history, I began to see that the film, rather than illuminating questions regarding Black capitalism’s viability, provides a springboard for a nuanced and generatively ambivalent historiography of its polarizing subject on local and national sociopolitical scales and within the broader televisual landscape of its era. The film’s narration and mode of address, like Nixon’s agenda, posits that conformation to capitalism is the answer to America’s wealth disparity, while simultaneously undermining the existence of unfair conditions. Reporter Bob Farmer describes a class-over-race distinction, but the film’s inspiration and basic premise, covertly inscribed within the edit, spotlights racial inequality in labor to a network audience. In other moments in Help, Asheville’s Black community are given an opportunity to describe, for themselves, the oppression of the current economic system, the obstacles they have overcome, and how Afram has opened up new avenues for increased independence. My essay on the film argues that, in its paradoxical promotion of a systemically racist economic system and its mission to uplift a population oppressed by that same system, Black capitalism, via Help, is unintentional yet seditious in revealing the underlying social, political, and economic contradictions that fuel America.
Although the navigation of Help’s confounding subject matter and contexts was challenging, the initial act of discovering and gaining access to this unique artifact was surprisingly simple and efficient. This was in large part due to the deep collection and stellar crew at WCFTR. In a broader sense, I hope my contact with Help points to the simple fact that the vast majority of our moving image heritage lies outside the domain of commercial, narrative features, just waiting to be rediscovered and recontextualized. As today’s political regime, at least as harrowing as the one behind Help, poses further threats to already underserved archives, libraries, and community spaces, the need to highlight the value in our collections, and to recenter the objects and perspectives most marginalized by oppressive systems, is as vital a task as ever.
Readers interested in viewing Help can reach out to WCFTR staff (wcftr@commarts.wisc.edu), to inquire about research access.
Will Hair is a New York-based writer, film programmer, and an alum of the Cinema Studies Master’s program at NYU. His research centers experimental, nonfiction, and nontheatrical cinemas, historiography, and the American South.