27 The American Film Institute’s AFI Catalog of Feature Films (Catalog.AFI.com) is renowned as the world’s most academic and comprehensive chronicle of the first century of cinema history, which documents every American feature film and co-production released from 1893 to 1993. As the premier authority on film history, the AFI Catalog database helps to drive society forward, toward greater inclusion, by directly informing the content of scholarly texts worldwide and, thus, forever impacting America’s cultural heritage. But the AFI Catalog is not only a reference for academics; it also engages widespread audiences to discover more about the past and encourages new conversations about the art form of filmmaking and it shines a spotlight on storytellers from diverse backgrounds who have traditionally been omitted from the historical narrative. In 2022, AFI was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for a project titled “Behind the Veil” that was named after the lost 1914 short film directed by Lois Weber. This landmark initiative was inspired by a previous NEH-funded project at AFI called “Women They Talk About,” after the Lloyd Bacon directed, 1928 feature-length film. That project sought to remedy the long-standing omission of female filmmakers from the historical canon by documenting their prolific feature film contributions to early cinema in the AFI Catalog. While working on Women They Talk About, AFI’s team of researchers determined that it was impossible to tell the actual story of women’s impact on America’s cultural identity without also including their work in short films. Likewise, the AFI Catalog team observed a deficit of information about filmmakers of color due to the exclusion of short productions and concluded that it was critical for shorts to be a new area of exploration. “Behind the Veil” involves researching short films released during the silent and early sound eras for documentation in the AFI Catalog. The research not only assists the Institute’s ongoing efforts to record the profound influences of women and people of color to the creation, distribution, and reception of early cinema, but rectifies an inclination in film scholarship that has long favored feature-length titles – a partiality that has limited historians’ efforts to study how people from diverse communities made films and how they represented and saw themselves on screen. With generous support from the NEH, AFI is on a mission to establish the foundation of a new canon that represents filmmakers, actors, and audiences that have been historically marginalized, and to offer a look “behind the veil” of that historical bias to reveal the true breadth of America’s legacy. Since the "Behind the Veil” project began, AFI has discovered that academia’s focus on feature films has denied researchers access to key information about the heterogeneity and rich productivity of pioneer filmmakers. For example, Alice Guy Blaché is believed to be the first person to make a narrative film, THE CABBAGE FAIRY (Le fée aux choux), in 1896. In 1910, she started her own American studio, Solax, where she directed roughly 20 feature-length films, all of which are recorded in the AFI Catalog. However, when accounting for her short subjects, Blaché’s filmography includes over 300 titles, which have now been added to the database, including the groundbreaking and extant 1912 short, A FOOL AND HIS MONEY, which is believed to be the first narrative American film with an all-Black cast (Figure 2) (Gleeson White 2019). Data from this project may confirm or dispute this assertion when it is published in 2025. America’s inaugural Black filmmaker, William D. Foster, also established a studio in 1910 to produce films that portrayed African Americans authentically, without racial stereotypes and blackface, but none of these
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