Pioneering filmmaker Oscar Micheaux was born on this day. You often hear statements along the lines of “Tyler Perry is the first Black American filmmaker to have his own production company.” This is not to take away from Perry’s accomplishments, but when people say this, they are erasing Oscar Micheaux. Oscar Micheaux lived and worked in the teens and 20s of the 20th century, far outside the brand-new movie-industry “system”, which wasn’t even a system yet (although part of the larger “system” of racism). Micheaux worked on his own and independently. Micheaux told stories where Black people were centralized, and Micheaux geared these films for Black audiences. He purchased the rights to extant material, and developed it for film. He also wrote a novel and adapted it for the screen. So, start to finish, it was all him: his vision, his words. He developed the scripts, produced the films, directed them, did the publicity, handled distribution, etc.
Sadly, the majority of Micheaux’s films are lost. So many films of the silent era are lost, due to deterioration, carelessness, poor archiving, lack of preservation. Back then, there was no sense that these films would be valuable one day, that one day there would be such a thing as film historians, or TCM, or film studies courses. We are lucky we have what we have. Maybe more of Micheaux’s films will turn up, discoveries of dusty reels stacked in a garage in the Netherlands or something. It’s happened before.
Micheaux’s best known work is Body and Soul (1925), starring Paul Robeson, and it’s included in a Paul Robeson box set brought out by Criterion.
It was a privilege to write about Micheaux for the site New York 1920, a day-by-day calendar of events in New York in the year 1920. On May 20, 1920, Micheaux’s film Within Our Gates screened for one night only in Harlem. Within Our Gates can be viewed on YouTube! I wrote about the film, its distribution, and Micheaux’s career in general.
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“Sadly, the majority of Micheaux’s films are lost. The silent film era is brutal that way. There was no sense that these films would be valuable one day – not just Micheaux’s, but in general.”
It’s puzzling that this is true for film, but much less so for music. Maybe it’s just a practical fact of recordings being easier to preserve than nitrate film, but it’s still odd that we’ve got Bessie Smith and Robert Johnson, but much less of Micheaux.
I know, right? I think yeah, nitrate is one of the problems – it was so volatile, so perishable, so many many fires, so much lost! People are still discovering old silent films locked away in garages or old offices.
Vinyl lasts!
also nobody had any sense that people 100 years from now would want to see these things. Maybe they didn’t with music either, I don’t know.