|
Printed Matter
Writing Himself Into History:
Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films, and His Audiences
By Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence
Published by Rutgers University Press
$20 (paperback) $52 (cloth)
Straight Lick:
The Cinema of Oscar Micheaux
By J. Ronald Green
Published by Indiana University Press
$29.95 (hardcover)
Too often, well-meaning scholars look to the past in an effort to recognize forgotten figures, but the approach usually overreaches and ends up as mere hagiography.
Fortunately, that is NOT the case with the renewed interest in director Oscar Micheaux (1884-1951), mainly because Micheaux truly earns the label of unheralded pioneer.
Simply put, Oscar Micheaux was the first major
independent African-American filmmaker. Not only did Micheaux write and direct his films, he also produced and distributed them. Yet, the reason Micheaux has been largely dismissed or overlooked by the mainstream film industry
is that his kind of movies, "Race pictures," were made
primarily for black audiences in the first half of the 20th
century, and many of his 40-plus features have been lost over the years.
The recent rediscovery of two powerful early works, Within Our Gates and Symbol of the Unconquered (both from 1920 confronting the topics of miscegenation, rape, lynching and the Klan), have brought Micheaux new attention, and not only from academics: this year's New York Film Festival presented a special retrospective of Micheaux's best-known surviving work, Body and Soul (1925, starring Paul Robeson), with a new score by Wycliffe Gordon played by Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra.
All three of these films get intense scrutiny in two excellent new books: Writing Himself Into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films, and His Audiences and Straight Lick: The Cinema of Oscar Micheaux. Though stylistically dissimilar, both volumes explore the life and work of Micheaux while maintaining a sharp perspective on the value and significance of this director's cultural presence.
The authors of Writing Himself Into History, Pearl Bowser, the co-director of the 1994 documentary on Micheaux, Midnight Ramble, and Louise Spence, an associate professor at Sacred Heart University, carefully examine production records, reviews of the day, stills of lost scenes, and the existing footage itself to make the argument that Micheaux controversially differentiated himself from other directors dealing with racial issues by refusing to romanticize his own people through simplistically "uplifting" stories. As Bowser and Spence write, "Appropriating ... stereotypes for a knowing audience, Micheaux redefined them not only to expose them, but also, in a remedial effort, to raise the consciousness of the audience in order to motivate change."
Other parts of Writing Himself Into History include a solidly researched biography that sorts out the true facts from Micheaux's "biographical legend," and a chapter on how Micheaux impacted the Black community, sometimes negatively, during the height of audience interest in his work. In the epilogue, the authors briefly touch on Micheaux's less acclaimed, less political and less popular sound films.
J. Ronald Green's Straight Lick, which looks at the entire Micheaux oeuvre, uses an alternative method to study some of the same material. Green, an associate professor of film at Ohio State University, employs less historicism and more theoretical analysis, with such chapter topics as "Micheaux vs. Griffith" (showing how Micheaux responded artistically to the racially charged Birth of a Nation), "Micheaux's Class Position" (asking if he was a bourgeois) and "Micheaux and Cinema Today" (comparing him to Spike Lee). Throughout, Green grapples with whether Micheaux perpetuated ethnic stereotypes or revised them, but, like Bowser and Spence, tilts affirmatively toward the latter notion.
Both books also make the point that Micheaux distanced himself from the Harlem Renaissance period (1918-1935), during which he was most prolific: Green writes that, "Micheaux hated much of the literary work
of the Harlem Renaissance and found some of it trivial."
Yet, the entrepreneur in Micheaux tried to collaborate
with Zora Neale Hurston on an unrealized film project
and occasionally incorporated jazz and blues into his sound features.
Even Micheaux then might favorably regard Rhino Records' new four-CD release, Rhapsodies in Black, a collection of 85 songs and readings from the Harlem Renaissance, "the Mecca of uplift" (says Green). Highlights of the box set include original, restored tracks by Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway and new readings of works by Hurston, Langston Hughes and W.E.B. DuBois.
The CDs and the two books actually make good companion pieces, spotlighting a bygone era that still gleams with vitality and relevance. As Thulani Davis puts it in the foreword to Writing Himself Into History, "the urges, motivations, arguments, and dreams of Micheaux's time are very much the same today."
-Eric Monder
VideoHound's DVD Guide
By Mike Mayo with Jim Olenski
Visible Ink (The Gale Group)
$19.95
The VideoHound group of film reference books has managed to put a frisky take on film criticism without dumbing down the content, even though its logo is a Rover sketched wearing shades.
While the Gale Group's previous references have mined eclectic lodes with VideoHound's World Cinema by Elliot Wilhelm and VideoHound's Independent Film Guide by Monica Sullivan - and its colossal 1,812-page annual, VideoHound's Golden Movie Retriever, has become one of
the videophile's standards - the celluloid pooch has gone cutting edge with VideoHound's DVD Guide by Mike Mayo.
The new 728-page guide rates more than 3,000 DVDs as movies and as DVDs, with often wide discrepencies between the two. Frank Capra's Meet John Doe, for instance, rates three bones as a movie and only one bone as a DVD for fuzziness and mediocre sound.
Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch is rated four bones (highest rating) as a movie but only three as a DVD.
The explanation by co-author Olsenski reads: "...restored
to its original glory (and running time) after being available
in a cut version for 20 years. The DVD also features The Wild Bunch: An Album in Montage, the Academy Award-nominated documentary by Paul Seydor and Nick Redman.… While the disc isn't perfect - there is a little too much grain -
it is the best way to see this gem. There is a CAV laserdisc box set that's somewhat sharper but requires a side change every half-hour. The DVD's colors are good, as is the contrast
and brightness. The blacks are very close to true and
the grain doesn't increase in dark scenes. Artifacts
are minimal. The sound has been mastered in 5.1 and sounded better to me than when I saw the restored film in the
theater. Jerry Fielding's excellent score has never sounded better, nor has the Wild Bunch's final shootout with Mapache's army."
The reviews run six to ten sentences, are more substantial than most guides, and are split evenly between
judgments on the film and technical qualities. Each review includes 25 components including MPAA rating, musical composer, type of DVD case, distributor, format and aspect ratio. As is usual in VideoHound's books, awards are
effusively logged and it seems that the occasionally omitted cinematographer or misspelled composer that marred early editions of the annual have been corrected for the more
specific books, such as this one and VideoHound's War Movies, also by Mayo.
As is usual with VideoHound's volumes, the indices are sublime ‹ to directors, actors, screenwriters, cinematographers, composers, genres and categories, distributors and alternative titles. The directors' index pinpoints immediately the pictures of any director that have been released on DVD. This guide will continue to grow, since DVD revenues are expected to equal VHS earnings by 2002.
-Jerry Roberts
|
