Quotes of the Day

In the so-called Golden Age of movies, American blacks looked up at the screen and asked, "Where am I?" Then they looked closer and saw that the portrayals of blacks amounted to a racial libel.

Consider three landmark films of the first half of the 20th century. The first "great" movie: the Civil War epic "The Birth of a Nation"(1915), whose blacks were cringing or lazy or venal or rapacious, and whose heroes were white men in white sheets. The first "talkie": "The Jazz Singer"(1927), with the white showman Al Jolson singing "Mammy" in blackface. The biggest hit of its era: "Gone With the Wind"(1939), which romanticizes slave-owning Southerners and for whom the only good Negroes were the ones who stayed with their owners after the War.

The man who inspired both black and white feature-filmmaking was D.W. Griffith. His 1915 epic "The Clansman," cannily retitled "The Birth of a Nation" after its Los Angeles premiere, became a groundbreaking popular, technical and critical success. The first blockbuster, it was the most widely seen movie of the silent era. In its bold editing and composition of shots, in its alternation of intimate scenes with spectacular battles and a final thrilling chase, the film established a cinematic textbook, a fully formed visual language, for generations of directors. The potent drama of its subject and method stirred President Woodrow Wilson to say, "It is like writing history with lightning; my only regret is that it is all so terribly true."

The acclaim of Griffith's masterwork made his virulent, derisive depiction of blacks all the more toxic — indeed, potentially epidemic. This was not simply a racist film; it was one whose brilliant storytelling technique lent plausibility and poignancy to images of crude Negroes in the Reconstruction Senate, and of a black man pursuing a white woman until, to save her virginity, she throws herself off a cliff. Viewers could believe that what they saw was not only historically but emotionally true. "Birth" not only taught moviegoers how to react to film narrative but what to think about blacks — and, in the climactic ride of hooded horsemen to avenge their honor, what to do to them. The movie stoked black riots in Northern cities, and by stirring bitter memories in the white South, it helped revive the dormant Ku Klux Klan.

"The Birth of a Nation" provoked another movement: the birth of an African American cinema. Educated blacks, enraged by the film's message and influence, wanted to refute "Birth" in its own medium. (The NAACP also wanted to suppress it.) Within a year of Griffith's film, the Chicago-based brothers George and Noble Johnson had set up the Lincoln Motion Picture Company and released "The Realization of a Negro's Ambition." Soon entrepreneurs, black and white, were making black-cast pictures in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Jacksonville, Fla. — virtually everywhere but Hollywood. Eventually some 500 race films were made and were shown in an equal number of segregated movie houses.

A SEPARATE CINEMA

Sometimes plodding, sometimes didactic, sometimes deliriously disjointed, often the race films were, quite frankly, terrible.
— film historian Donald Bogle in "A Separate Cinema: Fifty Years of Black-Cast Posters"

The ambition to bring entertainment and perhaps enlightenment to black audiences was laudable. Yet the poverty of means and technique, of skill and experience, gave these movies a rough quality. Often they had no quality at all. Indeed, for many modern viewers, the lure of race-cast movies is their incompetence. So many are finalists for those Golden Turkey Awards.

In their artlessness, they were also clear mirrors of their time, perhaps of their audiences, certainly of their writers and directors. For in most race films, as in mainstream Hollywood product, it was white people taking the pictures. They imitated the Hollywood genres of comedy, melodrama, musicals and Westerns. Race movies were counterfeit white movies — faux-ofay. And though the producers surely didn't intend to offend their customers, black-cast pictures flaunted racial stereotypes: idle bucks spending the rent money on dice games and numbers policies, and the women who love them. In the 1939 "Moon Over Harlem," directed by B-movie cult fave Edgar G. Ulmer and written by his wife Shirley, a brassy woman at a wedding reception announces, "When I get married again, I'm gonna marry me a real high-yaller. He may beat me, but I know my good home-cookin' will bring him around."

The solution might seem to be for blacks to seize the means of production. At least a black director would bring an innate sympathy to exploitation material. Yet in the generation of race movies, only one black director received frequent commissions from his white bosses to make movies. That was Spencer Williams, Jr.

Williams (1893-1969) was a large, boisterous actor-singer best known for playing Andy Brown in the early-50s TV series "Amos 'n' Andy." In early-talkies Hollywood he had worked as a sound technician for Christy Studios, helped write a series of black-cast shorts based on the stories of Octavius Roy Cohen and appeared in all four Herb Jeffries black Westerns of the late 30s. In 1940 he wrote and appeared in the cheapie black-cast horror movie "Son of Ingagi," He was then hired by Dallas exhibitor Al Sack to write and direct films, apparently with a minimum of front-office interference. In the 40s he made nine or ten of them: oddball melodramas ("Girl in Room 20"), low-octane jive musicals ("Dirty Gertie from Harlem U.S.A.," "Juke Joint") and — rare in race movies — religious epics "(The Blood of Jesus," "Go Down, Death," "Of One Blood").

Aesthetically, much of Williams' work vacillates between inert and abysmal. The rural comedy of "Juke Joint" is logy, as if the heat had gotten to the movie; even the musical scenes, featuring North Texas jazzman Red Calhoun, move at the turtle tempo of Hollywood's favorite black of the period, Stepin Fetchit. And there were technical gaffes galore: in a late-night scene in "Dirty Gertie," actress Francine Everett clicks on a bedside lamp and the screen actually darkens for a moment before full lights finally come up. Yet at least one Williams film, his debut "Blood of Jesus" (1941), has a naive grandeur to match its subject. A morality play about an angel and a devil fighting for a woman's soul, it begins with a baptism and ends in bloody death near a cross — all scored to rousing gospel music. Fifty years after its making, "Jesus" was selected for inclusion in the Library of Congress' National Registry of Films.

For all the artistic freedom he enjoyed, Williams was still a white man's employee. To achieve true independence, blacks needed to raise the capital that would allow them to pursue their own visions. And in the 30-plus years of race cinema, there was only one black man with the drive and doggedness to write, produce, direct, finance and distribute his own films. That was Oscar Micheaux, the first black to direct a silent feature, and the first to direct a talkie feature. In so many ways, Micheaux was the D.W. Griffith of race cinema. And also its Edward D. Wood, Jr.

MICHEAUX THE SHOWMAN

The Surrealists loved bad movies, seeing them as subversive attacks on the tyranny of narrative form. What would they have made of Edward D. Wood's horrifyingly inept cine-poems — or of Oscar Micheaux's melodramas, with black actors in whiteface?
— J. Hoberman in "Bad Movies," Film Comment, July-August 1980

Take a stroll on the north side of Hollywood Blvd. At no. 6721, in front of Joe's Diner, across from the Ripley's Believe It Or Not emporium, stop to glance down at the pavement. There you will see three consecutive stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame: for Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte and Oscar Micheaux. You recognize two of the names. The tan tantalizer Dandridge was the first black to be nominated for a Best Actress Oscar ("Carmen Jones," 1955); Belafonte was and is the cool, sexy actor-singer with a half-century's radiance. But Micheaux? Considering his instructively bizarre, virtually anonymous career, no one would have expected Micheaux to achieve this celebrity in cement. No one but Micheaux himself.

A self-made success — or colossal failure, depending on your indulgence for strange movies — Oscar Micheaux was born in Metropolis, Ill., in 1884. After various menial jobs he followed Horace Greeley's advice, went West and became a South Dakota homesteader. He lived among whites and, it is said, took a white woman as his lover. In his late 20s he began writing novels; to finance their printing, he went door-to-door, raising funds from his white neighbors. His first self-published, semi-autobiographical novel, "The Homesteader," appeared in 1913. When black film outfits sprang up after "The Birth of a Nation," Micheaux offered his novel to the Lincoln Motion Picture Company on the condition that he also direct. Lincoln declined, Micheaux bolted and began raising money for his film as he had for his books. "The Homesteader" premiered in 1918.

Thus began one of the most bustling, inspiring, preposterous and sustained bursts of misdirected energy in movie history. Over the next 30 years, Micheaux helmed about 23 silent films and 17 talking pictures. A full-service auteur, he typically adapted one of his own novels for the screen, directed it, produced it and released it. He financed the films by showing a previous work and a synopsis of his next project to exhibitors, friends, strangers on the street and the occasional Negro businessman. And when the film was ready, he peddled it theater door to theater door. (Sometimes he got help from his wife, the actress Alice B. Russell. She appeared in many of his films and, under the name A. Burton Russell, was often listed as producer.)

Many of these films were lost for decades, then recovered and restored; many are still missing. But enough are extant — and available from the resourceful archivists at Facet Multimedia — to give ample evidence of Micheaux's social fervor, his rudimentary story-telling technique and his peculiar views on uplifting the Negro race. Micheaux's films must be seen to be disbelieved. But for a full understanding of movie history and film style, black history and American history, they surely must be seen.

The silent Micheaux films I've seen are not poorly made. And unlike most films aimed at blacks, Micheaux's were movies about blackness (sort of — I'll get to that shortly). The 1925 "Body and Soul," which I discussed in my last That Old Feeling column, has a robust narrative that nearly matches the charismatic presence of Paul Robeson as a preacher who charms, abuses and steals from his congregation of womenfolk. "The Symbol of the Unconquered" (1921) is a rambling, mostly charming love story about a black man who loves a light-skinned black woman but is afraid to propose to her for fear of rejection, as she was afraid to cozy up to him for fear she was too light for him. The original film climaxed in a sequence advertised as "the annihilation of the Ku Klux Klan." Alas, those anti-"Birth of a Nation" scenes have not survived. But the film shows what Micheaux learned from Griffith: melodrama, at full throttle.

The 1920 "Within Our Gates" is even better (stranger). Another garbled answer to "Birth," "Gates" bastes a murder plot together with both white and black villains. A white woman rails against the education of black girls ("Thinking will give them a headache") and worries that it will give them the notion to vote. One Negro layabout, who has lyingly implicated a fellow black in a murder case so as to ingratiate himself with his white boss, preens in a dialogue intertitle: "Here I is 'mong da whi' fo'ks, while dem other niggahs hide in the woods." He is surrounded by white men and, in a grisly shot, imagines himself lynched. At the climax, a white man attempts to rape a light-skinned black woman, who is revealed to be ... his own daughter!

One oddity about this crusading pioneer was that he was a bit of a racist. Or, anyway, a shade-ist. Over and over he filmed the scenario of a light-skinned women passing as white, and a dark-skinned man ignoring a women of his own shade to aspire to that wan princess. Her lightness put her atop the hierarchy of virtue or, at least, of perceived romantic appeal. Like Griffith, Micheaux's feminine ideal seemed to be prim, virginal Lillian Gish; he insisted that his actresses wear chalk makeup to make them seem whiter, lighter — Gishier. "The first offense of the new film is its persistent vaunting of intra-racial color fetishism, "wrote the black critic Theophilus Lewis, reviewing a 1931 Micheaux talkie, "Daughter of the Congo," in the New York Amsterdam News. "Even if the picture possessed no other defects, this artificial association of nobility with lightness and villainy with blackness would be enough to ruin it."

BAD

Edward Wood may be the Worst, but Oscar Micheaux is the Baddest — with all that that implies. ... Scenes climax in a cubist explosion of herky-jerky jump cuts wherein an actor appears in a succession of slightly askew angles. ... Actors play multiple roles, some characters seem blessed with precognition while others get marooned in alternate universes. ... Lines are delivered in unison, there are awkwardly failed attempts at overlapping dialogue, some actors appear to be reciting by rote or reading cue cards.... Left stranded in scenes that are grossly overextended, his performers strike fantastic poses, stare affectingly into space, or gaze casually off-camera.
— Hoberman, "Bad Movies."

To talk about Objectively Bad Films (from now on, OBF's), we need a brief course in moviemaking and movie-watching. Nearly all films strive to make their technique invisible. Audiences may be enthralled or bored by the picture, but they usually don't notice — at least, they're not supposed to — how the placement of the camera, the delivery of lines and the editing rhythm create a plausible fictional world. Even mediocre movies speak the language of film grammatically, if not beautifully.

Bad movies, by their very deficiencies, instruct us in film grammar. Watching an OBF — and seeing, say, a sudden, senseless close-up from the same angle as the master shot it interrupted — the viewer intuitively realizes that, in a dialogue scene involved two people sitting next to each other, consecutive close-ups are usually photographed from diagonal angles, to give the viewer the sense of his head turning from one speaker to the other, as he would if he were in the room with them. The first filmmakers created this convention and many others, and all later directors have followed it. But not the makers of OBFs. By drawing our attention, in their visual faux pas, to the film-grammar rules they are breaking, OBF's offer the viewer education by embarrassment and increase appreciation for films that have even the minimum daily requirement of competence.

Micheaux's work represents the apogee or nadir of Bad filmmaking. (If he'd been a British subject, the Queen could have given him a New Year's honor: an O.B.E. for his O.B.F.s.) His close study of Griffith's visual lexicography got him through the silent period, but the demands for realism in sound films harshly exposed his inadequacies of technique. "The longer Micheaux made films," Hoberman observes in his perception-busting essay, "the badder they got." The director seems not only to have learned nothing from 30 years of filmmaking, but also to have seen no other films.

Micheaux's films are often absolved for the conditions under which they were made: a short shooting schedule and budgets in the $15,000 range. Yet another race movie — Dudley Murphy's "The Emperor Jones" with Robeson — was made in a week in 1933 for $10,000. And that looks like "Citizen Kane" next to any Micheaux film of the period.

And they're bad — in a way every bit as fascinating as they are stupefying. As Hoberman notes, "It's been said that Micheaux deliberately left mistakes in his finished films — to give the audience a laugh."

None of these criticisms are meant to imply that blacks couldn't make good movies, or that Negroes of the time were roiling with shade-ism, intra-racial rivalry and self-hatred. It's preposterous to extract generalizations about a society from the films a few people make in it. Who can say what Hollywood's superhero movies, serioso dramas or idiot teen comedies "tell us" about America? Or the ultra-violent Japanese movies about Japan? Or Micheaux's movies about blacks? His films are his; they don't, and shouldn't have to represent all black social and artistic aspirations of the years between the wars. Coincidence and ambition made Micheaux the one black whose significant body of film work has survived. A different roll of the fates would have left us with some other black moviemaker, with a different agenda and perhaps a firmer grasp of cinema style.

But we're stuck with Micheaux's films. So are African-American film scholars. They are obliged, encouraged, desperate to pore over these films, these few precious artifacts from a crucial period in black history, that happen to have been crafted by a man who never came near learning how to make coherent movies. It's as if, for scholars of Middle English, the main extant text was not Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" but the barely literate, borderline-sociopathic scrawlings of one Gawain the Smithy.

Micheaux is thus both an opportunity and an embarrassment for black academics. Some throw themselves into this task, rightly figuring that bad films are no less revealing of an artist's complicated worldview than good ones. Others blame Micheaux's technical infelicities on a lack of funds, and ignore or rationalize the shade-ism. That must be how Micheaux got his star on the Walk of Fame and a post-mortem Golden Jubilee Award from the Director's Guild, and why the Producers' Guild has an Oscar Micheaux Award for those "whose achievements in film and television have been accomplished despite difficult odds." Actually, that's proper: a prize for sheer perseverance in a racially inequitable society, given in the name of a man whose passion to make movies overcame his inability to make good ones.

Next time: Micheaux's transgressive talk

• Richard Corliss
• Richard Corliss on the pioneer black director who made the worst, or maybe just the weirdest, films of all time