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Pordenone
2001 Oscar
Micheaux And His Circle
The critical consensus is slowly evolving
around the primitive films of Oscar Micheaux, the pioneering African American
novelist and producer/director. The key is the word “primitive,” which
refers as much to his production realities as to his stylistic choices (much of
which were dictated by his economic and technical limitations). There is a
movement afoot to re-examine his films in a whole new context, not in comparison
to the conventions of Hollywood (or for that matter any of the European studios)
style, but as a kind of guerrilla statement made outside the system. The selection shown at Pordenone were largely
gathered from a traveling series making the rounds in the US (in conjunction
with the new book, Oscar Micheaux and his Circle, by Pearl Bowser, Jane
Gaines, and Charles Musser), which is an unprecedented look into a chapter of
silent film production that has been virtually unseen outside of the “race”
theaters” that thrived in the cities from the twenties to the early forties.
Preservation of early African-American cinema only began recently, and without
the kinds of studio vaults and private archives that routinely saved even B
films from the past, many of the films remain incomplete. Body and Soul
(1925), the first feature to star Paul Robeson, is missing the entire first reel
which establishes the fact that Robeson is playing identical twins (a good man
who pretty much disappears for much of the film, and a crook who disguises
himself as a priest to swindle his brother’s small southern town
congregation). Even more frustrating is the climax of The Symbol of the
Unconquered (1920), the story of African American homesteaders in the West
that was partially inspired by Micheaux’s own experiences. As the Ku Klux Klan
gathers to drive a former soldier off his land and defile a single young black
woman living alone in the wilderness, the intertitles describe a missing scene
where the soldier drives off the horsemen with bricks! The earliest of the
Micheaux features presented is the 1920 Within Our Gates, his second
film, a heartfelt plea for education and a portrait of racism in the South
punctuated with a horrifying lynch-mob scene. Sincere and passionate, the
earnest film was not a great success when first released and Micheaux turned to
more traditional genres to pull in audiences, folding his themes into crime
melodramas and adventures, but decades later his passion overcomes his narrative
bumpiness and technical limitations and the horrors of racism are communicated
with startling clarity. It remains his most gripping film. A selection of
Michaeux’s sound films also played at the Ruffo, along with the documentary Midnight
Ramble (1994). Michaeux wasn’t the only African-American
director of the silent years, but he was the most prolific. Sadly, only these
three films survive from his silent era output, but Pordenone 2001 also
featured works by Roy Calneck (Ten Nights in a Barroom, 1926, an
all-black cast version of a popular temperance play), Frank Perugini (The
Scar of Shame, 1929, a social drama about skin color and class within the
African-American community), and Richard D. Maurice (Eleven P.M., 1929).
To my great frustration the timing of this last film (it played on the morning
of Napoleon and I had a train to catch) prevented me from seeing it to
the conclusion, but what I saw was invigorating and inventive. In addition, Pordenone 2001 offered a sketch of
early “race” cinema directed by whites and starring early African-American
stars (such as the hilarious Bert Williams in A Natural Born Gambler,
1916) and the first feature length version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1914),
which is also notable for the performance of singer/songwriter/actor Sam Lucas
as Tom, very likely the first African American to play a lead role in an
American film. A Pictorial View of Idlewild (1927) is a
twenty-five-minute documentary portrait of the summer vacation spot in Michigan
that catered specifically to the black middle and upper classes of the mid-west.
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