Zora Neale Hurston

Fieldwork Footage

Zora Neale Hurston

Cudjoe Lewis

Under the tutelage of anthropologist Franz Boas (her former Columbia professor) and Harlem Renaissance arts patron Charlotte Osgood Mason, Zora Neale Hurston spent nearly two years, from 1927 to 1929, studying the folkloric customs, work songs, spirituals, and vernacular language of African American communities along the River Road and from New Orleans to Florida.

Commandment Keeper Church, Beaufort South Carolina, May 1940

Zora Neale Hurston

Field recordings of religious services in a South Carolina Gullah community. Commandment Keeper Church, Beaufort South Carolina, May 1940 is a 1940 short documentary film which shows religious services taking place in a South Carolina Gullah community. In 2005, Commandment Keeper Church was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Zora Neale Hurston: Jump at the Sun

Sam Pollard

Zora Neale Hurston, Kim Brockington

Zora Neale Hurston, path-breaking novelist, pioneering anthropologist and one of the first black women to enter the American literary canon (Their Eyes Were Watching God), established the African American vernacular as one of the most vital, inventive voices in American literature. This definitive film biography, eighteen years in the making, portrays Zora in all her complexity: gifted, flamboyant, and controversial but always fiercely original.

Ethnographic Films

Zora Neale Hurston

These documentary sketches were made when the famed novelist was an anthropology student seeking to preserve a record of African American life in the rural South. Includes Children's games and baptism - Miami, Aug. 1929; Children's games and man with ax - April 1928; Children dancing and girl rocking on porch - Jan/Feb 1929; Baseball crowd and boy dancing capers Jan/Feb 1929.