Ina Archer
Ina Archer is a filmmaker, visual artist, writer, programmer, and Media Conservation and Digital Specialist at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture.
By Ina Archer
| April 22, 2026
The number in question features a remarkable cinematographic trick, imagining a Harlem nightclub where leggy chorines seamlessly change skin color from white to Black and back again, accompanied by a bluesy torch song played by a Black jazz orchestra.
It is a quiet but influential work in its depiction of blackness, of Black romance and alterity in a shifting urban landscape. The film is both elegiac and symbolic, yet precisely located in San Francisco and true to the early 2000s.