CITIZEN MICHEAUX.

Oscar Micheaux and His Circle: AfricanAmerican Flimmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era

edited by Pearl Bowser, Jane Gaines and Charles Musser

Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001 384 pp./$44.95 (hb)

Writing Himself Into History: Oscar Micheaux,

His Silent Films, and His Audiences

by Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence

New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000

273 pp./ $52.00 (hb), $20.00 (hb)

Straight Lick: The Cinema of Oscar Micheaux

by J. Ronald Green

Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000 316 pp./$29.95 (hb)

JENNIFER HORNE

Oscar Micheaux devoted 35 years to the production of a substantial body of cinematic work that responded directly to the degrading images of black Americans in the mainstream of American cinema. For Micheaux, the racialized figures of ridicule were both a source of and material for protest. Where films produced by white Americans presented these ridiculous stereotypes as excessive fragments with scant relevance to the main narrative, Micheaux attempted to delineate the social pathologies of race and racism. Deploying these figures in the context of cultural strife and political violence provided an important backstory to their pathological appearance. However, Micheaux's films are most notable for the absence of racial stereotypes and for the presence of a cast of accomplished black actors with a luminescent star quality that mirrors the highly capitalized white-centered studio films. Micheaux made what were then dubbed "race pictures." Typically (though not in Micheaux's case) race pictures (or "race movies" ) were made with all-black casts for black audiences and financed by interracial and black companies. Some critics have argued that such productions form a genre in themselves by virtue of the uniform espousal of a philosophy of "racial uplift." These films drew on nearly all genres but always retained their connection to the popular idiom of melodrama. Micheaux tapped into the melodramatic vernacular in order to make political films about racial identity; while the mixedrace romances and stories about families divided by race often provoked local white authorities to ban and censor his films, his work was as much designed to give black audiences back their self respect as it was to correct the gerrymandering of cinema's perceived audiences. In 1990, bell hooks characterized Micheaux's labor as "counter-hegemonic cultural production," citing his use of melodrama as a key feature of his cinematic transgressions. [1] The three books reviewed here owe a debt to hooks for casting that first stone, and bring us cl oser to the full analysis of race melodrama that we need.

A truly independent American filmmaker who was also a novelist and a frequent contributor to the black press, Micheaux distributed his films through his Micheaux Film Corporation, based first in Chicago and then in New York, to both black and white movie houses, often transporting the films himself. Between 1913 and 1948 Micheaux wrote, produced and distributed over 40 silent and sound motion pictures. Critically neglected, Micheaux's films have, until very recently, been judged either technically inferior, hastily made and too formulaic to warrant close readings, or unworthy of narrative analysis because of the ham-handed way Micheaux incorporated upward mobility themes in his screenplays and adaptations. Because of such qualities, surviving films have often been inappropriately lumped in with the low-budget "factory" films of the studio era. While Micheaux was, not surprisingly, ignored by the white trade press, he suffered equally at the hands of black film critics. His work was also criticized by establi shed cultural institutions: the National Negro Congress and Young Communist League voiced their discontent with what they felt amounted to negative portrayals of black people.

Micheaux was both a controversial and legendary figure in the black community for his bourgeois and assimilationist views and for the moralizing gaze he leveled against the black community, which he delivered to his audiences in tragically familiar caricatures. His film Body and Soul (1925), starring Paul Robeson in a remarkable dual role as good brother and bad brother, is a prime example of the problem Micheaux's filmmaking presents both critics and admirers: according to Charles Musser critics have found the film "puzzling," "disjointed and raggedy" and "confusing." [2] Should the film's disjointed narrative structure, implausible story and overcomplicated dream and flashback sequences be read as "radical stylistics" or as markers of ambitiousness marred by financial disadvantage? What should we make of its elaborate and aggressively writerly approach, a simultaneous re-working and re-reading of three plays by white playwrights ostensibly about Negro life? That we are in a moment in which we can pose such questions about Body and Soul is important. Answering them, as Musser demonstrates with his usual precision (no fewer than 145 footnotes), requires rethinking just what film historians have considered the ground of cinematic meaning. In his essay, which recently won a prestigious prize from the Society for Cinema Studies and is reprinted in Oscar Micheaux and His Circle, Musser deftly moves from the film text, to the film's production and popular reception, to the novels and plays the motion picture borrows from, and finally to a consideration of the cultural significance of Paul Robeson's participation in the project. Ultimately, Musser argues that Body and Soul is by far one of Micheaux's most daring accomplishments.

Those who wish to examine Micheaux's impressive oeuvre and its influence are profoundly disadvantaged, particularly in the case of the films he produced before 1931. Of the 26 silent films his company made, only three are extant. Scholars, filmmakers and archivists are left to consider Micheaux's place in American film history based on film fragments, translations of title cards from films found in foreign archives and scattered reviews and accounts of screenings in the trade and popular press. In the first really comprehensive and authoritative filmography covering Micheaux's silent films, the compilers describe the outcome of their labor as "tentative," and write that "[t]he degree of incompleteness cannot be overemphasized." [3] In the preface to their book Writing Himself Into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films, and His Audiences, Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence characterize their own project, which relies heavily on documentary and archival source material, as "a journey." Film historians now find themselves in the position of the journalists in Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941), trying to determine the meaning of a life from personal interviews and correspondence, fragmentary memories and archival traces. Given the mystification that has thrown Micheaux's status in the history of American cinema into question, should we be surprised to find that the story starts with Micheaux's inauspicious beginnings as a homesteader in South Dakota in a place called Rosebud? Moreover, that this name, the location of Micheaux's homestead, would provide only incomplete answers?

Welles's narrative is a more appropriate template for understanding Micheaux's interests, work and life than it might at first appear. Micheaux aspired to wield media influence, to become what Musser calls a "black-oriented media-consciousness" who clearly saw the interrelation between cultural production and citizenship. He placed all of his creative and capitalist efforts into the sphere of publicity. The new emphasis in film and cultural studies on public spheres and reception histories makes Micheaux an ideal vehicle for new historical and theoretical work. Jayna Brown's description of Micheaux's early novels demonstrates this perspective:

Micheaux was first and foremost, a businessman. For him economic pragmatism, not artistic virtuosity, was the key to racial uplift. Micheaux recognized popular fiction and film as valuable cultural commodities, as profitable vehicles of self-definition and self-representation. He was interested in creating, as well as reaching, a black audience primarily as a body of consumers. [4]

It is now possible to see that Micheaux's production of stories of "uplift" for a population that had not previously had a middle-class cinema to call its own did not preclude his exploitation of that audience as a consumer base.

In this way, as J. Ronald Green deftly shows in Straight Lick: The Cinema of Oscar Micheaux, what develops in Micheaux's work is the acute sense that there was a third option, a way to "slip the yoke" of the "exploit or be exploited" dichotomy of commercial cinema. In these critical reevaluations, the image coming into view of this tenacious and prolific author, filmmaker and entrepreneur is a decidedly doubled one: he was both a businessman and an oppositional filmmaker. However we seek to measure his success (and we can include his recent revival in our list of his achievements) it does appear that Micheaux's genius lay precisely in comprehending a fundamental principle of the information age: the saturation of social spaces by images directs the course of politics. The authors of these new works show how, like the independent black filmmakers for whom he laid a foundation--most notably Spike Lee, Charles Burnett and Julie Dash--Micheaux was adept at promoting his various artistic ventures to a politicized black middle-class audience. Straight Lick, Writing Himself Into History, and Oscar Micheaux and His Circle present Micheaux as a black culture industry pioneer who worked to establish a historical role for himself by taking control of the means of media production.

Micheaux's ability, even posthumously, to galvanize audiences, is indicated by the fact that these new books on Micheaux grow primarily out of public events, from small symposia and conferences to archival and television screenings. While Micheaux's renewed visibility would not have come about without the foundational work laid by Thomas Cripps and Donald Bogle two decades ago, the current climate in film studies has been profoundly altered by historical interest in the fractured public spheres of the silent era and the concomitant reevaluation of the areas of technology and standardization of American cinema. [5] While still neglected by the scholarly field they support, American film archives and the film preservation movement have taken on a much greater significance for film study. A growing and enthusiastic interest in the plight of "orphan films," those films that have been abandoned by film studies, lost or simply have no archive willing to undertake their preservation, is energizing a field held hosta ge by VHS and other formats designed for use by casual consumers. All three of the books reviewed here are the products of the new archivalism in film studies that seeks to treat the film text as merely one part of a complicated, multimedia discourse of visual culture.

As if to mimic the last-minute rescue--a plot device favored by Griffith and Micheaux--none of the new books on Micheaux fail to mention the serendipitous discovery and subsequent restoration of two prints of Micheaux films previously thought to be lost. Such venerable cultural institutions as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Turner Broadcasting and the Library of Congress have been involved in the preservation of these feature films. For this reason the chain of professional events in the last decade around this figure is indeed remarkable; it should not escape our notice that the new critical work on Micheaux is developing out of this unusual partnership between materialist film history and the capital-intensive preservation work of institutions. A film discovered in a Spanish archive that turned out to be Within Our Gates (1920) was returned to the United States and restored by the Library of Congress in 1995. A film found in the Cinematheque Royale in Belgium with French and Flemish titles is The Symbol o f the Unconquered: A Story of the Ku Klux Klan (1920). The MoMA and Turner Entertainment restored The Symbol of the Unconquered, adding new title cards and a score by jazz percussionist Max Roach. Turner Classic Movies broadcast a month of related programming on black cinema, using the documentary Midnight Ramble: Oscar Micheaux and the Story of Race Movies (1994, by Pearl Bowser and Bester Cram) as a centerpiece. The Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University held a conference on Micheaux in 1995, and out of that initial conference, a seven-part program of films--for which Oscar Micheaux and His Circle is the exhibition catalog--has been assembled and will make its debut at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto festival in Pordenone, Italy in October 2001. [6] In addition, The Micheaux Society, another sponsor of the restoration of The Symbol of the Unconquered, holds its annual meeting at the Society for Cinema Studies' conference. Indiana University Press will also publish another book by Green on Micheaux's relat ionship to the American left in the next year. [7] Though it may seem an untenable contradiction, Micheaux would have no doubt approved of this marriage of corporate and scholarly interests. After all, seeking out and accepting white financing for his sound films became a necessity in his fight against white racism.

The intrusion of white capital into authentic black cultural production is another reason to submit any treatment of Micheaux's film work to an economic analysis. Green's meticulously researched Straight Lick moves in this direction; Green offers a detailed account of the material and social conditions surrounding Micheaux's writing and filmmaking. The organizing insight of Green's project, which draws equally upon historical materials (trade press reviews, personal correspondence) and the competing social theories of W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington, is that the contradictory aspects of Micheaux's works are as much a manifestation of the place black Americans found themselves in at the beginning of the century as they were a problem inherent in the emerging conventions of mainstream American film narrative. The defining moment in Micheaux's activist, corrective approach to black cinema, according to Green, is the release of D. W. Griffith's The Birth of A Nation (1915), a film that outraged Micheaux and black audiences alike. Straight Lick begins with the premise that Micheaux opposes Griffith's filmmaking style in a kind of ironic mimicry. As Green puts it, Micheaux was "poaching and 'signifying' on Griffith's estate." [8] In fact, Micheaux was setting the record straight on the matter of white-on-black terrorism in general and on the false perception of a black sexual threat against white women in particular. Within Our Gates addresses this misrepresentation directly. (Indeed, Gaines has remarked that in the future all educational screenings of The Birth of a Nation should now be accompanied by a screening of either Within Our Gates or Symbol of the Unconquered.) Green borrows DuBois's notion of the ethnic double consciousness, or "twoness," in order to suggest that "taking the middle path" was the oppostional posture Micheaux consciously adopted in all areas of his work: from accepting white financing for his films, to using mixed-race casts, to mediating conflicts with the state censor boards who co nsistently stood in his way.

In the book's most provocative claim, Green argues that Micheaux's filmmaking intentionally aimed for low production values as a way to be more democratic, anti-racist and ethical than the dazzling and unrealistic images of new studio releases. Green attempts to remove Micheaux's work from the powerful gaze of "classical" narrative cinema by rejecting the idea that Micheaux ever sought to produce motion pictures based on a principle of uniform spectatation. To do so, apparently, is not so easy, as Green devotes a full chapter to elaborating the differences between Griffith's and Micheaux's film aesthetics. That chapter, "Micheaux vs. Griffith" might prove ultimately to be the most accessible to students of cinema, in part because of the useful taxonomy it provides of the "master formula" of melodrama. Straight Lick suggests throughout that a materialist film analysis, one that takes financing and politics into consideration, will overcome the prejudice that has kept critics from recognizing Micheaux's "refuta tional film style." As further demonstration of the problem of standards of reading, Green points out the contradiction of the critical praise heaped on the low-budget, handmade styles of the American avant-garde filmmakers on the one hand, and the simultaneous dismissal of Micheaux's rough-hewn style. Directorial decisions--aesthetic choices that have previously been considered a failure, accident or contingency of low-budget filmmaking--are recast in this description as Micheaux's desire to combat the "dangerous attraction" of slick, glossy, overproduced images. Green frames Micheaux's aesthetic as anti-bourgeois, middle-class and "moderate" without being mainstream:

Micheaux's pursuit of moderation and the middle path and his application of those principles to a wide variety of circumstances amounts to a thoroughly middle-class cinema with an integrity that was forged from some three decades' and forty films' worth of rigorously middle-class producing experience. Micheaux's is a cinema that occupies a class position from which both oppressedness and oppressiveness can be criticized with integrity, something Hollywood cannot do. [9]

In Oscar Micheaux and His Circle, Taylor, Jafa and Creekmur repeat and shore up Green's argument about production values. In a delightfully wide-ranging interview with Peter Hessli, Jafa points to consistencies in Micheaux's formal method in order to challenge the notion of Micheaux as a sloppy visual artist. "[I]f Micheaux was, as some have claimed, the baddest filmmaker of all time," Jafa says, "then what's remarkable is that over a thirty-year career he got badder and badder." [10] Creekmur's contribution to the Bowser, Gaines and Musser book centers on the issue of Micheaux's "radical unoriginality" as an author, his "signifying" ways. He offers more convincing analysis of the propensity Micheaux had to rewrite, remake, retitle, recut and re-release, placing Micheaux in the African American cultural tradition questioning notions of property and ownership. Taylor likewise frames the problem of production values using development theory borrowed from third world and postcolonial studies. Budget constraints on Micheaux's productions, Taylor argues, must be read not as deficits but rather as carefully fashioned markers of an underdeveloped subsistence economy operating in the shadows of the powerful "commoditizing drive" of American culture industry. Foregrounding the economic aspects of Micheaux's aesthetics, these readings move beyond discussions of Micheaux's citizenship to a rethinking of the politics of spectatorship. Green's argument is that if cinema produces spectators, then while Hollywood's white spectators are produced with little or no expectation that they can access the means of production, in the alternative case of Micheaux, "the spectators had greater proximity and reasonable access to the institutions of production, because those institutions were less capitalized."[11]

By contrast, Bowser and Spence's Writing Himself Into History pays little attention to the films' presentational style. Instead it treats any technical issues as indicators of Micheaux's struggle to survive in a capitalized mode of expression. Their book covers much of the same territory as some of the essays in Bowser's collaboration with Gaines and Musser (which includes a chapter reprinted from Writing Himself Into History). The details of Micheaux's personal and artistic desire to overcome the institutional and commercial obstacles he faced provide more fertile ground for the sort of auteurist analysis Bowser and Spence undertake, allowing the layers of autobiographical simulacra and veiled intertextual references that Micheaux obsessively worked into his projects to justify the metaphor of writing and inscription used by the authors throughout. Bowser and Spence link his self-inscription into his films and novels as both a gesture of masculine egotism and a recognition of the politics of history in which survival depends upon the purposiveness of the agent. In their examination of the three extant silent films (The Symbol of the Unconquered, Within Our Gates and Body and Soul), to which they dedicate half of the book, Bowser and Spence provide a much needed reading of the situation of women in the philosophy of racial uplift. Melodrama has not, after all, generally been considered a genre kind to women. In Micheaux's treatment of the inextricably linked racial and sexual politics of the U.S., the authors argue, truth discourses are represented in all of their historical and narrative contingency. As a result of this presentational style, a transformation around the issues of gender occurs: "Micheaux turns objects into subjects."[12] Both Green and Gaines (in her essay "Within Our Gates: From Race Melodrama to Opportunity Narrative" in Oscar Micheaux and His Circle) seek to underscore Micheaux's apparent affinity for middle-class feminism with readings of a camera style designed to humanize where scopic desir e, in other silent melodramatic features, seemed only capable of objectification.

In addition to raising salient questions about filmic depictions of race and sexuality, these new readings of Micheaux's work bring to the surface questions about the stability of the notion of "classical" style underlying much of the academic work in cinema studies. Because of the degree to which these new books aim to understand Micheaux within the broader context of modernization and middle-class consumption, perhaps a return to the proposal made by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino in 1971, to the notion of a second cinema, is warranted.[13] In that document, the second cinema filmmaker was described as someone "trapped inside the fortress" of a commercial system but who still aimed to reach 'the outer limits of what the system permits." Those who have taken up Micheaux's cause have an implicit critique to offer: if Micheaux did not fully accept the tenets of his entrapment, why should we?

JENNIFER HORNE is completing her doctorate in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota and is a visiting instructor at Haverford College in Haverford, Pennsylvania.

NOTES

(1.) bell hooks, "Micheaux: Celebrating Blackness" in Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 25, no. 2 (Summer 1991), pp. 351-360.

(2.) Charles Musser, "To Redream the Dreams of White Playwrights: Reappropriation and Resistance in Oscar Micheaux's Body and Soul" in Pearl Bowser, Jane Gaines and Charles Musser, Oscar Micheaux and His Circle: African American Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 97.

(3.) Charles Musser. Corey K. Creekmur, Pearl Bowser, J. Ronald Green, Charlene Regester and Louise Spence, "An Oscar Micheaux Filmography: From the Silents through His Transition to Sound, 1919-1931" in Bowser, Gaines and Musser, p. 229.

(4.) Jayna Brown, Black Patriarch on the Prairie: National Identity and Black Manhood in the Early Novels of Oscar Micheaux" in Bowser, Gaines and Musser, p. 133.

(5.) Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (New York: Viking, 1973). Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900-1942 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).

(6.) A touring package will be available for rental from MoMA in 35mm.

(7.) Green provides a more complete account of "the groundswell of interest" in an appendix of Oscar Micheaux and His Circle called "The Reemergence of Oscar Micheaux: A Timeline and Bibliographic Essay."

(8.) J. Ronald Green, Straight Lick: The Cinema of Oscar Micheaux (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000), p. 1.

(9.) Ibid., p. xv.

(10.) A. J. Jafa, 'The Notion of Treatment: Black Aesthetics and Film," based on an interview with Peter Hessli and additional contributions from Pearl Bowser, in Bowser, Gaines and Musser, p.14.

(11.) Green, ibid., p. 30.

(12.) Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence, Writing Himself into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films, and His Audiences (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), p.155.

(13.) Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, in Bill Nichols, ed., "Towards A Third Cinema" in Movies and Methods, Vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 44-64.