Oscar Micheaux

Oscar Micheaux is the most prolific African American filmmaker---and perhaps independent filmmaker---in the history of American cinema. He wrote, produced, and directed nearly 40 features between 1919 and 1948, although few of them have survived. Most of his movies, like those of other early mostra altro African American filmmakers, were independently made "race films," which featured African American actors in major roles, unlike the all-white-produced studio films of the time, which employed white actors in blackface, as in D. W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation." The racism of this film, in particular, prompted the formation of many all-black companies, including the Lincoln Film Company of Nebraska, which first sparked Micheaux's interest in the cinema. Micheaux worked shining shoes, doing farm labor, and as a porter until 1904, when he purchased a homestead in South Dakota. By 1913, he owned 500 acres and had published the first of 10 semiautobiographical novels, "The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer" (1913), which he sold successfully door-to-door. In 1918, the Lincoln Film Company approached him about filming "The Homesteader" (1917). When the company refused to produce the film on the scale he wanted, Micheaux decided to do it himself. He founded his own production company and shot the movie in an abandoned studio in Chicago, where it opened in 1919, inaugurating a decade of successful filmmaking for Micheaux. Much of this success can be credited to the promotional strategies he developed while selling his novels. Micheaux toured theaters in African American neighborhoods, soliciting advances from owners and securing screening dates, circumventing the cash flow and distribution problems that other African American companies encountered. He employed relatively cheap, nonprofessional actors and billed actors as black counterparts to white stars. Micheaux was virtually the only African American filmmaker to survive the 1930's and the Depression, the skyrocketing of production costs with the advent of sound, and the entry of Hollywood into the "race" market with all-black musicals produced, directed, and written by whites. Micheaux's films have been controversial from the beginning. Because his budgets were always minimal, the movies have poor production values: poor acting, cheap sets, poor lighting, and amateurish editing, with frequent violations of continuity---coherent spatial and temporal relations from shot to shot. Some film theorists have come to see these "flaws" as virtues, the elements of a perhaps self-conscious aesthetic critical of the Hollywood paradigm. They argue that classic realism and continuity may be complicit with oppressive ideologies in a way that more stylized genres like melodrama are not. Such forms can provoke thought by distancing the viewer from the characters and actions instead of soliciting identification and overinvolvement, as realism does; "poor" production values, like avant-garde techniques, can also have this effect. At least as controversial as his aesthetics is Micheaux's version of "racial uplift." His audiences were frequently ambivalent about the bourgeois ideology of the self-made man that Micheaux seemed to represent in his films, in which only light-skinned blacks succeeded, often by passing as whites. His characters seemed to live in a separate but equal world, as if black poverty and white racism did not exist. Micheaux argued that his films represented a range of images of African American life, rather than reproducing white stereotypes or limiting black actors to roles as servants. In 1948, after a 10-year absence from the industry, Micheaux staged a disastrous comeback with "The Betrayal," which was extensively and negatively reviewed in both the black and white press. Its failure ended his career. He died three years later while on a promotional tour for one of his books. (Bowker Author Biography) mostra meno