Try a Little Tenderness

Hanging in the balance between cultural necessity and market demands is the courage to craft a story and cinematic world of your own design. As the Academy Museum’s milestone Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898–1971 exhibition showcases, Black film pioneers were courageous enough to pursue that act despite structural and cultural barriers. The reward for their courage is a rich history that resists all categorization and convention.  

This series, covering the same timeline as the Regeneration exhibition, uses tenderness—pointed moments of affection—as a guide to navigate Black cinematic history. With touchstones such as the swoon-worthy moments of romantic love in Something Good - Negro Kiss (1898) to the acts of communal love and poetry of the everyday in Several Friends (1969), Try a Little Tenderness invites you to explore how tenderness allows us to touch Black cinema’s past and future.