Possible historical footage in Sinners
Aug. 18th, 2025 11:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
enujaI have been rewatching Sinners, showing it to people who haven't managed to see it yet. I love the film, but there is one film-making mystery that I just can't solve, and it's bothering me. Usually, I'm good at googling things, but I can't find any mention of this. I will describe this mystery in a spoiler-free way.
In two scenes, one close to the beginning of the film and one close to the end, there are short snippets of film that feel to me like archival, historic film, colorized and modernized, instead of modern recreation. The costume department did great, there are lots of modern actors looking very 1932 Clarksdale, Mississippi, but something about these two clips just hits different. Part of it might be the focus and panning choices, and some of it is definitely about the humans being depicted.
In the first piece of film that struck me as being marvelously out of place, we are being shown the main street of Clarksdale, which is segregated, with a black side and a white side. There are two black men leaning against a pillar and smoking. It's a very short shot, none of the principal actors are in it, and it just looks different. One guy has a deeply cut side part, which was characteristic of 1930s hairstyles, but not something the hair stylists do that much to the extras and actors in the film. Another big part of it is that the camera moves jerkily and frames poorly: we get the men smoking and a flash of the faces, then their striped shirts and dark suspenders, then their faces again.
The second piece of film is a bunch of work men jumping out of a truck on a job site. Contextually, there are principal actors all around, but this specific shot doesn't include any of them, and none of these particular work men are featured earlier or later in the film. It's shown as a flashback while a main character is making a decision, and again, neither the filmmaking nor the humans feel like the rest of the film. In this case, the shot starts out blurry, focuses, and then pulls back an unsteady way that is not characteristic of most of the filmography of Sinners.
However, in this case, what looks like this truck is blurry in a wide shot of the principal actors (or maybe their stand-ins), and we also see the workmen, occasionally blurry, after they get out of the truck, in front of a hedge that is a core part of the site of principal photography for the outdoor sawmilln shots. I haven't been able to figure out if any of the people in the truck are the same as the modern-day extras walking in front of the modern hedge, but at this moment I think they are different people.
I have two images of a man in a broken hat, one from the presumptive historical footage, one from presumptive modern footage. If this is the same human, there probably isn't any historic footage in Sinners. If these are two different people, there are probably two snippets of historical footage in this film. If it's two different people, the costuming of the modern actor is absolutely perfect.
So are these colorized, edited snippets from actual historical, film, or just Ryan Cougler messing with us? Because Cougler really could really be using historically accurate piss-poor filmography in order to make certain scenes and extras look more authentic.
Back when Wobbegong was teaching middle school history in the early 2000s, he played the first part of Seabiscuit to illustrate the Great Depression to his students. Parts of Sinners feel historically useful the same way (not that any part of this very rated R film could be shown in a middle school), but, like Seabiscuit, most of it very much looks and feels like a modern recreation. But these two short snippets feel like the real thing.
"The real," or authenticity, is a huge theme in Sinners. The Sinners soundtrack features historic recordings, including Pick Poor Robin Clean by Geeshie Wiley, a song used to great effect in the film. And, yes, the historic audio recordings have persistent background noise, hisses and pops, and captured only a small frequency spectrum from reality. Yes, these old recordings are dogshit compared to what it must have been like to listen to this music live. But, for me, listening to and watching the real thing, in addition to the modern recreation, is very valuable.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geeshie_Wiley
In two scenes, one close to the beginning of the film and one close to the end, there are short snippets of film that feel to me like archival, historic film, colorized and modernized, instead of modern recreation. The costume department did great, there are lots of modern actors looking very 1932 Clarksdale, Mississippi, but something about these two clips just hits different. Part of it might be the focus and panning choices, and some of it is definitely about the humans being depicted.
In the first piece of film that struck me as being marvelously out of place, we are being shown the main street of Clarksdale, which is segregated, with a black side and a white side. There are two black men leaning against a pillar and smoking. It's a very short shot, none of the principal actors are in it, and it just looks different. One guy has a deeply cut side part, which was characteristic of 1930s hairstyles, but not something the hair stylists do that much to the extras and actors in the film. Another big part of it is that the camera moves jerkily and frames poorly: we get the men smoking and a flash of the faces, then their striped shirts and dark suspenders, then their faces again.
The second piece of film is a bunch of work men jumping out of a truck on a job site. Contextually, there are principal actors all around, but this specific shot doesn't include any of them, and none of these particular work men are featured earlier or later in the film. It's shown as a flashback while a main character is making a decision, and again, neither the filmmaking nor the humans feel like the rest of the film. In this case, the shot starts out blurry, focuses, and then pulls back an unsteady way that is not characteristic of most of the filmography of Sinners.
However, in this case, what looks like this truck is blurry in a wide shot of the principal actors (or maybe their stand-ins), and we also see the workmen, occasionally blurry, after they get out of the truck, in front of a hedge that is a core part of the site of principal photography for the outdoor sawmilln shots. I haven't been able to figure out if any of the people in the truck are the same as the modern-day extras walking in front of the modern hedge, but at this moment I think they are different people.
I have two images of a man in a broken hat, one from the presumptive historical footage, one from presumptive modern footage. If this is the same human, there probably isn't any historic footage in Sinners. If these are two different people, there are probably two snippets of historical footage in this film. If it's two different people, the costuming of the modern actor is absolutely perfect.
So are these colorized, edited snippets from actual historical, film, or just Ryan Cougler messing with us? Because Cougler really could really be using historically accurate piss-poor filmography in order to make certain scenes and extras look more authentic.
Back when Wobbegong was teaching middle school history in the early 2000s, he played the first part of Seabiscuit to illustrate the Great Depression to his students. Parts of Sinners feel historically useful the same way (not that any part of this very rated R film could be shown in a middle school), but, like Seabiscuit, most of it very much looks and feels like a modern recreation. But these two short snippets feel like the real thing.
"The real," or authenticity, is a huge theme in Sinners. The Sinners soundtrack features historic recordings, including Pick Poor Robin Clean by Geeshie Wiley, a song used to great effect in the film. And, yes, the historic audio recordings have persistent background noise, hisses and pops, and captured only a small frequency spectrum from reality. Yes, these old recordings are dogshit compared to what it must have been like to listen to this music live. But, for me, listening to and watching the real thing, in addition to the modern recreation, is very valuable.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geeshie_Wiley
