A Pioneering Black Film Maker

By Scott Heller

From The Chronicle of Higher Education

SUMMARY: There is a surge of interest in black film maker Oscar Micheaux, who between 1918 and 1948, made more than 40 films, silent and later with sound. He portrayed black Americans in melodramas, dramas about social problems, gangster stories and musicals. After a long period of neglect, his films are being shown and books and articles introduce him to movie lovers.

A black sharecropper is unjustly accused of murdering a white plantation owner. He and his family try to flee, only to be surrounded by a lynch mob. Husband and wife are strung up, but their small son escapes on horseback.

Meanwhile, the brother of the plantation owner threatens to rape the sharecropper's daughter in her home until he notices a scar on her chest and realizes that she is his daughter.

This sequence, coming near the end of Oscar Micheaux's 1919 silent film Within Our Gates, was so potentially explosive that both black and white church leaders in Chicago tried to cancel its showing, fearing that it would re-ignite the race riots that had plagued the city. In other cities, Micheaux fought censors who wished to cut the segment, or drummed up attention by hawking the screening of the "complete version" of the film.

A PRINT IN A SPANISH ARCHIVE
Four years earlier, black leaders had protested D. W. Griffith's The Birth of A Nation, charging that its version of history was racist, its portrayal of black-on-white rape sensationalistic. Yet, in the years since, Griffith's film has become an inarguable, if problematic, landmark of American film. Micheaux's melodrama fell out of circulation and was thought lost until the late 1980's, when a print in a Spanish archive, under the title La Negra, was repatriated to the United States.

The rediscovery of Within Our Gates and another early film marks the latest chapter in the story of Oscar Micheaux, an early black film maker, novelist and entrepreneur. Thanks to scholars and archivists who for years have argued his case even when they had seen relatively few of his films Micheaux is taking his place as a pioneer in the history of American cinema.

Working within established genres without resorting purely to stereotypes, Micheaux's films offer a wide-ranging look at black life in the early-20th-century United States. His themes reverberate with contemporary urgency racial solidarity, assimilation and the politics of skin color.

"He's gone from being a cipher in movie history to being a central figure," says Thomas Cripps, a professor of history at Morgan State University and the author of two histories of blacks in American film.

Inspired by Booker T. Washington and Horace Greeley, Micheaux was a dogged entrepreneur who literally went west to make his fortune, settling in South Dakota and acquiring more than 500 acres of land by his mid-20's. His experiences on the frontier were the subject of The Homesteader, one of seven novels he wrote.

Typically, he published the books himself and sold them door to door. When a film-production company tried to buy the rights to The Homesteader, Micheaux balked during the negotiations, formed his own production company, and made the film himself.

Between 1918 and 1948, he made more than 40 films, crossing over from the silent to the sound era. They included melodramas, social-problem dramas, gangster movies and musicals. He died in 1951.

'HE WAS OFTEN SCANDALOUS'
Cripps dealt glancingly with Micheaux in his 1977 account, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900-1942, published by Oxford University Press. He discussed the director among a small group of film makers who made "race movies" intended for black audiences and shown in segregated theaters. But, he found Micheaux an erratic stylist whose signal achievement was as a businessman. And he pointed out that the black middle class had given up on Micheaux, who was seen as too critical of black institutions, including the church. "They thought he should have been uplifting when in fact he was often scandalous," says Mr. Cripps.

Race movies died out when Hollywood saw a market and began making films with black casts, choking off independent producers and distributors. Micheaux was generally forgotten, most of his films lost or destroyed. But like colleagues in literary studies, who have recovered such writers as Zora Neale Hurston and Nelia Larsen, film experts have begun to take the steps that will make Micheaux and his work central to film history, and to black cultural history more generally. That includes the creation of a small scholarly society devoted to his work.

Three articles on the director are included in Black American Cinema (Routledge, 1993), an American Film Institute reader edited by Manthia Diawara of New York University. One piece, on Micheaux's idiosyncratic film style, is part of a forthcoming book by J. Ronald Green, a professor of art history at the Ohio State University. The piece by Jane Gaines, director of the film and video program at Duke University, is part of her forthcoming book, Other/Race/Desire.

Also in the works is a long-awaited study of the director's early films and "biographical legend," entitled In Search of Oscar Micheaux, published by Rutgers University Press. Its authors are Louise Spence, an assistant professor of media studies at Sacred Heart University, and Pearl Bowser, an independent scholar who has pressed for more than 20 years to see Micheaux's films widely recognized. She is the codirector of Midnight Ramble, a documentary about race movies that ran on Public Broadcasting last year.

Those professors and others attended the first scholarly conference devoted exclusively to the film maker's work, held in January 1995 at Yale University. The conference included screenings of three Micheaux silent films, as well as westerns and melodramas made by other production companies.

Organizers plan to put together a tour of six silent films, including several by Micheaux, and an accompanying catalogue. Museums and festivals have begun to show his work more frequently. The American Museum of the Moving Image organized a major retrospective last year.

THE FEEL OF A FAN CLUB
Among the films shown here was Symbol of the Unconquered, a frontier romance in which the lead couple almost doesn't come together because the black hero believes the light-skinned heroine is white. The film was thought to have been lost, until a print was discovered a few years ago in a Belgian archives. The Yale screening featured titles in French and Flemish, with a professor reading English translations from a podium near the corner of the screen.

The conference had the feel of a fan club as much as a scholarly meeting. Many of the participants had been long-time admirers of Micheaux, and were excited to see restored 35-millimeter prints projected with musical accompaniment. Also attending were a handful of collectors of black memorabilia and a screenwriter whose biographical treatment of Micheaux is before executives at Home Box Office, a cable television network.

During one coffee break, Sister Francesca Thompson of Fordham University brought out a scrapbook of sepia photographs and newspaper clippings about her parents, Evelyn Preer and Edward Thompson, who were leading figures on the black-theater circuit in the 1910's and 1920's. Evelyn Preer had the lead role in Within Our Gates, giving Sister Francesca the chance to see her mother on screen.

Clyde Taylor of Tufts University raised one of the few cautionary notes at the meeting. He called on scholars to pay attention to the systematic forces that had undermined black film makers throughout the history of Hollywood, and not merely to push for the inclusion of a new name on a list of movie greats.

"Will cinema studies use Oscar Micheaux and his colleagues as what Toni Morrison calls canon fodder?" he asked.

Scholarship on the director is still in its infancy, in part because earlier scholars, including Cripps, often worked from newspaper reviews and correspondence, not the films themselves. A complete filmography is still up for grabs, since the director was known to cut segments from one film and release them under a new title.

"It's at the archaeological stage, since there are so many questions we can't answer," says Gaines of Duke. She and Charlene Regester of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill publish the newsletter of the Oscar Micheaux Society.

But the essays in Black American Cinema and other articles sketch out a debate about the films' aesthetic merit. Other scholars argue that aesthetic concerns are not what is most important about early black cinema. They pay attention to Micheaux's business practices and his relationship to mainstream Hollywood. Or they focus on the ways his films bring to light differences within the black community about upward mobility, skin color and interracial romance.

"There is a density to these films," says Charles Musser, an assistant professor of film studies and American studies at Yale. "You want to keep on going back to see them again."

For one thing, Micheaux's narratives are unusually serpentine and do not adhere to the strict Hollywood standards that came later. The incendiary lynching sequence in Within Our Gates, for example, comes as part of an extended flash-back. Late in the narrative, it provides the viewer with the history of Sylvia Landry, the film's leading character, a light-skinned black school teacher who ventures north to raise money for a Southern school committed to educating black children.

PAUL ROBESON'S FILM DEBUT
Body and Soul, made in 1924 and featuring Paul Robeson in his first movie role, tells the story of a duplicitous preacher and his earnest brother. Robeson played both parts, giving the film a confusing, if not surreal, air, a mood magnified by an "it's only a dream" ending.

His independence and bold public persona have led some writers to draw a parallel between Micheaux and Spike Lee. Musser finds that this year's celebrated director, Quentin Tarantino, could have learned a thing or two from the director working 70 years ago. Tarantino's Pulp Fiction shuffles chronological events in ways that reviewers now call bold, he points out. "Micheaux was doing it in the 1920's," he says.

The Yale conference did not deal with Micheaux's later films, which were hopelessly hampered by the costs of recording synchronized sound. "Since he would never do a retake, the films appear ludicrous," says Green of Ohio State. "People would make mistakes in the dialogue, and they would stay in the film."

But scholars agreed that the director's silent films were fascinating yet hard to pin down on the subject of race.

A CONSCIOUS RETORT
In her paper, Gaines argued that Within Our Gates was a conscious retort to The Birth of a Nation, which featured a notorious sequence in which a mulatto threatens to rape a child-like white woman. In his film, Micheaux sets up a similar sequence, heightened by editing, but in this case the victim is black, the rapist is white, and the story depicts the lynching of the victim's family.

Also working within the confines of melodrama, "Micheaux undermines the logic of white supremacy put forward by Griffith," Gaines maintained.

In their book, Spence and Bowser will link critical readings of the films to Micheaux's biography and to the history of early black amusements. They plan to weave in material drawn from oral histories of people who attended race movies.

The writers argue that Micheaux was at once businesslike and oppositional, working to create commercial movies yet often resisting the standard depictions of blacks.

"I'm not going to claim that Micheaux was akin to the Harlem Renaissance," says Spence. "But I certainly think anyone studying black cultural life of the 20's who gets beyond the Harlem Renaissance should definitely include Micheau. Scott Heller, a correspondent for The Chronicle of Higher Education, lives in Boston and writes on a wide variety of subjects.

This article has been cleared for republication and abridgment in English and in translation by USIS and the press outside the United States; it may also be carried over the Internet. Credit to the author and the following note must appear on the title page of any reprint:

Reprinted with permission from The Chronicle of Higher Education. Copyright (c) 1995.