Pioneers: Oscar Micheaux
Micheaux wrote, directed, and sold his own pictures because the studios would not. He had been a Pullman porter and a South Dakota homesteader; the novels came first, then the films, shown on the race circuit to houses Hollywood did not count. Two-thirds of the work is lost. What is left includes Within Our Gates, which the Library of Congress treats as the earliest surviving feature by an African American director, and The Exile, the earliest surviving sound one. The prints are incomplete and the talkies are rough. The argument is not. Lynching, passing, color inside the race, a school that will not get built. Chicago's board sat on Gates for months. He cut footage and kept going.
9 films
Within Our Gates
1920 · Oscar Micheaux
The answer to Griffith, made with Griffith's tools. The lynching is cut against an assault the way Birth of a Nation cut a rescue, and nobody arrives. The Spanish print is what survives, which is its own comment on who kept it.
The Symbol of the Unconquered
1920 · Oscar Micheaux
Same year, and he goes at the Klan in all but name. The night ride, sheets against a black sky, is the image. The reel where the riders are routed is lost, so the film ends before it wins.
Body and Soul
1925 · Oscar Micheaux
Robeson's first film and the only one he made with a Black director. He plays the preacher as a con man who knows exactly how a room works. New York's board cut it from nine reels to five; the Eastman nitrate is closer to what he shot.
The Darktown Revue
1931 · Oscar Micheaux
Eighteen minutes of a revue for a Black house, shot flat. A choir, a comedy duo, and a sermon in blackface. Micheaux does not explain it, and the film is worth the discomfort because he does not.
The Exile
1931 · Oscar Micheaux
The earliest surviving sound feature by a Black director, and it sounds like it: rough sync, long takes, a camera nailed down. The story is his own life on a South Dakota claim, and that is why it is here. Listen past the recording.
The Girl from Chicago
1932 · Oscar Micheaux
A numbers racket, a Secret Service man, a nightclub that doubles as a church. Micheaux borrows a pulp plot because a plot is a container for faces Hollywood would not photograph. The musical numbers are the budget spent where you can see it.
Veiled Aristocrats
1932 · Oscar Micheaux
Color inside the race, played as a family argument in a living room. The lawyer objects to his sister's husband for being dark, and Micheaux gives him no cover. From Chesnutt, with Lorenzo Tucker sold as the Black Valentino.
Ten Minutes to Live
1932 · Oscar Micheaux
Two plots in one cabaret and a note with a clock in it. His tightest sound picture, built from his own stories, and the numbers keep interrupting because they were the draw. Start here if the talkies have put you off.
Birthright
1938 · Oscar Micheaux
A Harvard man comes home to Tennessee to build a school, and the county has other plans. A remake of his lost 1924 silent, and the sound has finally settled down. Late Micheaux: quieter, still not asking permission.