Oscar Micheaux: The Superhero of Black Filmmaking (2021) - full transcript
A look at the life and work of Oscar Micheaux, a pioneer of the African-American film industry.
Looked at Oscar Micheaux
as the originator of DIY...
do-it-yourself, independent.
He means groundbreaking.
He means freedom and possibilities...
the possibility for me to exist.
Oscar Micheaux means you can do it.
No matter what your environment,
no matter what your time,
you can simply do it.
Oscar Micheaux is the most important
black filmmaker who ever lived.
Period.
We do have an entry in black history...
who made what personally
amounts to his shovel.
He was Spike Lee
before there was Spike Lee.
And this is the 70th anniversary
of his passing.
This mule ain't from Moscow.
This mule ain't from the South.
But this mule's had some learning.
Mostly mouth-to-mouth.
It was very tough for most black families
and black people at that time,
knew what they had to do.
We had come through
the worst of being slaves.
Then there was a civil war.
So stand fast, young Romeo.
Soothe in contemplation
thy burning whole and aching thigh.
Your stubbornness is ever-living
and cruel anxiety is about to die.
So after the aftermath, it was like,
okay, either we're going to
have to learn this well,
do for self, a do or die.
♪ Freedom for your daddy's daddy ♪
♪ Freedom for your mama's mama ♪
♪ Freedom for your brothers and sisters ♪
♪ But no freedom for me ♪
It was difficult for everybody,
but he was determined and quite successful.
You can make it if you try.
If you think Oscar Micheaux,
you think, put your head down
and go forward, and you'll get it done.
I wonder how many know him?
I discovered Oscar Micheaux by by accident.
I was at the Carbondale, Illinois, library
looking at the nonfiction section,
and there's this picture
of him on the cover
that looks compelling.
I start reading that book
and I can't put it down,
and I couldn't believe I hadn't
heard about this man's story.
It's the greatest American story
that nobody knows anything about.
Well, his family came from Kentucky.
They were slaves.
They crossed into southern
Illinois when slaves were freed,
and they started to tend farms
outside a small town
called Metropolis.
Micheaux, because he was
raised in a farm family,
really had this rugged individualism
and this hard work ethic.
He's five of 11 children.
His relationship
with his mother was profound,
and it was profound because
she probably had the ambition
of all of those who were enslaved,
which is one day, not only will we be free,
but we will be equal
and have equity in this land.
His mother was a great admirer
of Booker T. Washington.
Booker T. Washington's great philosophy
was that education would lift
black people up in America.
At Micheaux's time,
there's all these legal barriers
to stop black folks from moving forward.
And education was really
the only thing you could use
to break through some of these barriers,
and Micheaux used it to his full advantage.
He believed in kind of pulling
yourself up by your bootstraps.
He believed in the whole notion
of learning a skill
and combining that with kind of education
and really moving forward with that.
His trajectory from being
a young man, or a teenager even,
was to get out of Metropolis, head north,
where there was opportunity, better money,
and thousands of black people
living in the black belt of Chicago.
He wasn't a slave anymore,
so the fact that a lot of black folks
there were able to be nomadic and travel
and be able to get great experiences
away from being in one place.
That's what also galvanized
a lot of this energy and talent.
Well, Chicago is
kind of exploding at that time.
You know, it is part
of the Great Migration,
a lot of black folks leaving the South
to find the American dream, really.
It was a really powerful community
in the sense that there formed the basis
for a kind of political mobilization
and the creation of vibrant black culture
and black artistic communities.
And so this was a really important space
in which Micheaux could start to imagine
where he can make a name for himself.
I think he was someone who looked forward.
And, you know, in many ways,
the key experience for Micheaux,
I believe, was when he worked
as a Pullman porter
on the American railroads.
Even though they were waiters
and sort of cabin people,
people who made up rooms,
they did, in a sense, mingle
with very high-class white people
and talk to them and get to know them,
and I think Micheaux,
in that experience, said,
"If these people can live like this,
I can live like this and African-Americans
can live like this."
It's no surprise to me that
someone like Micheaux would,
like someone like Malcolm X,
their early life,
their formative years be shaped
by some degree
of working on the train,
working on a railroad.
That's a defining
sort of modernist impulse.
And so Micheaux is a part of that.
He is a part of this ebb
and flow of culture and ideas
and imagination
that the train really embodies.
He met people. He talked to them.
He got books from them.
He learned about society, about politics,
about entertainment in different cities.
It really made him a worldly man,
much more than a lot of people
who spend their lives
entirely in the Midwest.
Pullman porters, at that point in time,
were both like the greatest job
in the world for a black person,
but also the worst job
in the world for a black person.
It's terrible because you
have to pay for your uniform,
all your meals, laundering.
Eventually, you have no money
out of your salary.
One of the things
that all the Pullman porters did
was to sell tickets on board,
it was called, but not report that money
and then sometimes steal money.
He was, in fact,
fired once for taking money.
They believed he took $5.
So what did he do, being Oscar Micheaux?
He went to St. Louis,
where there was another
Pullman porter operation.
He went through the same school
and got hired all over again.
There's no Internet,
they're not checking on him,
and he starts running,
you know, the southern route
in a different Pullman porter route.
He had tremendous American
spirit of "start over again,
let's do it."
He preaches idealism and purity,
and sometimes he's...
is a little tricky over here,
getting things done any way he can.
There was a vast expanse in which
one could imagine one's future was huge.
And then on top of that, Oscar Micheaux
was always a very observant person.
And so as he was working the terrain
and probably doing a lot
of shucking and jiving
and the kind of, like,
performance that one had to do
to get good tips from white passengers,
he was also listening to them,
and he was listening to the conversations
that white businessmen were
having about the opportunities
out West to buy land.
And so he begins to formulate his plans
for becoming a homesteader.
Land was cheap on the roads,
but you had to get the option of bidding
because you were drawn in a lottery.
But if you did, you had a chance
if you had money,
and he knew that,
and so he took that chance.
♪ Dream of a land my soul is from ♪
♪ I hear the hand stroke of a drum ♪
♪ Shades of delight ♪
♪ Cocoa hue ♪
♪ Rich as the night ♪
♪ Afro blue ♪
Micheaux is really unique in that sense.
I mean, he wasn't afraid to be
the only black person
in Gregory, South Dakota.
He wasn't afraid of that,
which a lot of black folks at that time
would have been very frightened about that.
I mean, this is a time
of lynching where black folks
are being lynched all over the country.
Black life is not valued very high.
Land figures extremely
prominently in his imagination
but in the life
of black people of the time,
because many in the South were promised
their 40 acres and a mule
and virtually no one gets that.
Micheaux, again, saw something,
I think, different with that.
It was sort of running through
some of the political theory
and some of the ideology of the time,
so I think land is symbolically important,
but to him, it embodied something more.
He must have been quite a sight
to his neighbors in South Dakota,
and I think at the core was his work ethic.
I mean, even if he was going to
face some kind of social discrimination,
the fact of the matter was that
he put the money together
to buy that land and he worked
that land every day.
Why, Mr. Baptiste,
I've been looking for you all morning.
I'd begun to think that you weren't coming.
I'm sorry, I intended
to be here much sooner,
but something held me up
and I couldn't make it.
I hope you'll pardon the delay.
That's quite all right,
perfectly all right.
Ultimately, he was able to gain
the respect of his neighbors
because he demonstrated in his efforts
that he really was someone
who wanted to make
this project work for him.
And I think the fact that
he was in South Dakota
and had that unique experience out there
with his white neighbors,
that's an experience
that a lot of black folks
did not have at that time.
All agreed, Mr. Baptiste.
He can vote at home and work for you.
And I hope he pleases you.
If he does not, you just tell me
and I'll attend to him.
Oh, that'll never be necessary.
I try to get along
with everyone, Mr. Stewart,
and I'm sure that Bill
and I will make it all right.
Well, I'll be running along now.
I'll look for the boy in the morning.
Father, dinner is ready.
Don't let Mr. Baptiste go yet.
Ask him to stay for dinner.
By all means. I'd forgotten.
You must stay for dinner, young man.
In the meanwhile, meet
my daughter, Miss Agnes,
Mr. Baptiste.
And he also had this
dream that he would share it
with what he called "the one true woman."
He was always looking for
the one true woman in his life.
While he went off in search of women
that he knew in New York, Chicago,
St. Louis, writing them letters,
seeing what they were like,
were they available,
would they like to meet with him,
including his first wife,
that he married out of Chicago
that was disastrous with a
stillborn child on the Rosebud.
And the worst winter
of the several that he
had lived through came.
Frigid snow, then rain that turns to ice.
And he was stuck in his little shack
because you don't go farming.
He was all alone. He felt he was
at the end of his ropes.
And he had always admired writers
like Jack London and novels
like "Martin Eden."
Jack London could write "Martin Eden"
as an autobiographical novel,
that he was going through
this terrible physical struggle,
trying to live on the prairie,
that he, also, had been spurned by women,
that he, too, was also alone
against forces beyond his control.
And he becomes not
Oscar Micheaux, the failed...
landowner of the Rosebud.
He becomes Oscar Micheaux
the successful novelist,
the black novelist telling the true story
of Black American life on the Rosebud.
He took his farming experience,
his experiences as a Pullman porter,
and he kind of translated
that onto the written page.
Then he kind of took the means
to kind of self-publish, as well...
self-publish and
self-distribute these books.
Then he goes to all
these neighbors who he's helped.
He'd go to the local bankers and he'd say,
"You give me a little money, you sign this,
I sell some books,
I give you some money back."
They all invest in his life story.
He turns his first book
into what we guess
is some kind of bestseller.
Good morning, madam.
Having been a Pullman porter,
he knows all these places
in America, in his area.
He starts to travel, and he goes
to the black communities,
and sometimes he's going door-to-door.
"My name is Oscar Micheaux.
I've written this book.
It's my life story."
I have just what you want to be reading.
This is it.
A fine new novel by a Negro author.
Going door-to-door to sell the books.
I think it comes out of
that small-town experience
that he had because
I think it was in
that small-town experience
that he discovered that
you could rely on others
to help you to move your art forward.
And you say it's by a colored author?
What's his name?
I forgot to get his name myself.
Um, here's his picture.
Maybe his name is under it.
He has an intelligent face.
He really wanted to get his message out
to the race as a whole.
And so what better way
than this new medium of cinema?
Not totally new, but new in
the hands of black artists.
Cinema has, I think he recognized,
the ability to mirror.
So when black audiences would
look at other black characters
on the screen, which was rare at the time,
that could give them a different
kind of visual sense
of what they could be.
It's a medium that allows someone
to reflect upon themselves,
their own identities
and their own possibilities.
This is a little bit
before the American cinema
became sort of really
industrialized and corporate.
Still, in the 19-teens,
it was very much a mom-and-pop operation.
There were a lot
of very small film companies.
There were few, as they called them,
Negro film producers
that were feeling that,
you know, "This is
a new accessible technology.
We can make our own stories."
Noble and George Johnson,
who ran the Lincoln Motion Picture Company,
made these really classy, inspiring stories
focused on sort of
the middle and upper classes.
The two African-American brothers,
George and Noble Johnson,
wanted to make a film
of Micheaux's third novel,
and they approached him
and tried to buy the rights,
but they couldn't come up
with enough money,
according to Micheaux.
They must have been like,
"Who is this guy?"
Like, coming from nowhere.
He's got this self-published novel,
and he wants to dictate how
the film is going to be made.
I mean, they're telling him,
you know, maybe it can be two
or three reels, and he's imagining,
no, it's more like seven or eight reels,
and he has never made a film.
The idea is in Oscar Micheaux's head,
"I don't want it to be like a three-reel
or like Noble Johnson's,
and this is all a big movie."
"I could do this,
and I don't need Noble Johnson."
That's the kind of person he was.
He just said, "Oh, I'll make it."
No one really walks off the street
at that point in time in the '20s and '30s
and says, "I'm going to
make a film," right?
You have to have a kind of inroads
into that studio system, largely.
I mean, he would get on the phone
or he would write to people that he knew,
to people that he had charmed.
And he said, "This is my vision.
By hard work alone,
I shall produce this work."
And people bought into that vision.
One of the things
I've always loved about Micheaux
was that independent spirit,
that thing of not letting
anything stop him
from being his artistic self.
He gets a little small crew
and drives out to Gregory,
South Dakota, to shoot a movie.
They've got the cameras in the back seat.
You've got to remember, too,
there's no film school,
no one can teach you how to do this.
I mean, you've got to figure this out
pretty much on your own.
And I think all of that comes from
that experience in South Dakota.
You've got to go out
in the middle of nowhere.
You've got to plant your seed.
You've got to grow the crop,
and then you've got to harvest it,
and then you've got to take it to market.
I mean, he does all of that with film.
Micheaux is like that guy
who's walking down the street
and he's playing the drum,
playing the horns,
playing the keyboard, and he's doing it.
It was sort of crowd filmmaking,
that the people
that are around you
become a part of your practice,
a part of the process.
And that's a very kind of storied practice
in black filmmaking, that you
find people around you
to fund your film, to make your film,
to help you distribute, to travel with you.
I mean, so it is, again,
a community-based model.
That's why he's the patron saint
of black filmmakers,
because he's like the ultimate
independent filmmaker.
Micheaux was a big motion-picture fan,
but he didn't love everything he saw.
He hated "Birth of a Nation."
"Birth of a Nation"
was a real cultural phenomenon.
There had never been a film in
the history of the United States
that had had that kind of impact.
More than any other single work,
"Birth of a Nation"
transformed American cinema
into the American film industry.
Griffith, in his own right,
creates the language of film.
He's the first filmmaker
actually to use the juxtaposition
of close-ups and long shots
and master shots and cutaways,
you know, in simultaneous action.
But he does it in the service
of what I call
a science-fiction film.
Science-fiction films show
the fears of the time.
"Birth of a Nation"
was such a horrendous film
for black folks in America,
and it led to lynchings
that led to the rebirth of the Klan.
And so he tries to respond to
that film the best way he can.
"Within Our Gates" was a film
that kind of tried
to celebrate Black Americans,
especially the black middle class,
and I think that really kind of
turned the narrative
of "The Birth of a Nation" on its head.
The idea that we could
be good, bad, mad, angry...
we could be all kinds of things...
it's a direct response to
the framing of African-Americans
in "Birth of a Nation."
It's a direct answer, which is,
"That's not who we are.
This is who we are."
"The Birth of a Nation"
features the coming together
of the white north and the white south
through romantic relationship.
And Micheaux does the same thing
but with black characters.
A black woman from the South
has a variety of suitors to choose from,
but her relationship
with a doctor from the North
is one way that Micheaux
is demonstrating the kind of
healing of the black community
across regional divides
and a creation of a black uplift marriage
that's going to disprove all of
the things about black people
that "The Birth of a Nation" is suggesting.
He's speaking to the future of the race,
and that is really emphatic.
It doesn't always make for the most...
kind of like escapist viewing experience.
Instead, it's like he's holding
a kind of magnifying glass
to American race relations and
really making you look at things
that you had not appreciated
with the naked eye.
Oscar Micheaux, in 1920,
in doing that film,
getting that onto American movie screens,
having the guts to go out and do that
and show what he thought
was the truth of America
is so far out on the envelope,
it's almost beyond the realm
of what's actually possible,
I think, of that time period.
Audiences were completely stunned.
I was stunned when I saw it 60 years later.
And so we immediately,
as a band at that time,
began to make a record about
this African-American filmmaker.
We started spending
a lot of time with Oscar
and all these films,
and the music was like...
you know.
It was so compelling that it
came out very rapidly.
I think one can see, especially,
the flashback in "Within Our Gates"
as a kind of response to Griffith,
but in a certain way,
to a certain kind of racism
that was very...
unfortunately very present
in the United States.
He was very much wanting to speak back to
a false narrative, a dishonest narrative
that Griffith propagates in his film.
And very much, also, wanting
to create some space
for black people to tell their version
of what often happens,
for instance, with a lynching...
that there is often no crime, right?
He wanted to make sure
that those things were clear.
"Birth of a Nation"
makes lynching of black folks
a positive thing.
And the fact that Micheaux takes
those kind of counter-images
that he constructs himself
and targets them directly back
at "Birth of a Nation"
is a really, really powerful
thing at the time.
When they showed the mob
attack the young boy...
and they hang his parents,
those kind of images...
you know, you've got to understand,
those were very shocking at that time.
In Micheaux's films,
they're not documentary footage,
but they're documentary elements.
These are things
that are happening in society
and to the black community.
And he takes those things and
he weaves them within the story.
"Within Our Gates" is
kind of an example of that.
And Spike does that. You know,
I do that with my films.
Obviously, he didn't do it
the way we did it
in "BlacKkKlansman" or "5 Bloods."
But in essence, it's the same kind of idea.
And I think Micheaux
was one of the first people
to really do that on a major scale.
I think we can get our head around,
in 1919, knowing, you know,
we're in Jim Crow era.
We're in times of mass discrimination
and segregated America.
♪ Swing low ♪
♪ Ooh ♪
♪ Swing low ♪
♪ Ooh ♪
I think what you have to
understand about American racism
is that it was very much built
around the idea of segregation.
That is my school, your school,
my bathroom, your bathroom.
Segregation was about space,
and as long as you stayed in your space,
you could do a fair amount.
Whether it be food, shelter,
clothing, entertainment...
all these things that we said,
"Well, we know what we like.
We don't see this for us.
We're going to see if we can do for self."
♪ Swing low ♪
♪ Sweet chariot, yes ♪
♪ Coming for to carry me home ♪
So, segregation was isolating,
it was restrictive,
it was dangerous, it was scary.
There were tremendous limitations.
But segregation was also,
in many spaces, safety
and comfort and familiarity.
All of the black leaders
and artists and figures
in history during this period,
they found a way to use
segregation to their advantage,
and Micheaux is one of
the best examples of that.
African-Americans were able
to develop, within those spaces,
their own institutions.
So since they had their own theater,
they had their own literature,
they had their own churches,
why not have their own cinema?
So in a way, that's where Micheaux fits in.
Ladies and gentlemen, we're about to open
the primetime revue.
All right, boys, hit it!
Hollywood, for the
most part, is not making,
not telling our story.
They're not making black films.
And so Micheaux has kind of
the corner on the market
in that sense.
He uses that to his advantage.
And so it was kind of the best of times
and the worst of times.
For the Negro people
at the time, to see oneself
or a vision of oneself
that is moving and animated
and giving off life,
you know what I mean, was a phenomenon.
For me, a movie doesn't become a movie
until it meets an audience,
and that's something that Oscar Micheaux
knew and understood.
He was making films
about subjects and issues
that mattered to black people
and that mattered, full stop.
You will not be able to stay home, brother.
You will not be able to plug in,
turn on, and cop out.
You will not be able
to lose yourself on skag
and skip out for beer during commercials
because the revolution
will not be televised.
He was showing history from the
African-American point of view,
and his films are very powerful and modern
in terms of their ideas,
in terms of their style,
and in terms of their budgetary gloss.
Have read that he wasn't a good filmmaker.
I, on the contrary,
and many others think that's
because he was a kind of
almost experimental filmmaker,
that he was really somebody
who played with form
in a very interesting way.
He took what he could borrow
from things that he likes,
so you see scenes in "Body and Soul"
that are very German expressionist.
Very, very striking, especially
when he's doing scenes
with nature and wind storms,
which he loved wind.
So he was very sophisticated,
sometimes in the lighting
and in the composition.
The film that strikes me the most
from Oscar Micheaux's filmography
is "Body and Soul."
I'm a fan of Paul Robeson,
and so to see an early work
by Micheaux of a young Paul Robeson
is incredible to me.
Oh, Micheaux was so good at casting!
He was so good at discovering people.
Paul Robeson... he was an
all-American football player.
He had graduated from law school.
He was already known as a serious actor.
This is about 1923, '24.
Paul Robeson doesn't show up
in other motion pictures
until the early 1930s.
It's Oscar Micheaux
who says, "Paul Robeson.
He's amazing."
In "Body and Soul," we have Paul Robeson
playing these two twins.
And people have different
readings of the film,
but for me, "Body and Soul" represents
people who would prey
on other black people.
That was one of the targets that you see
in almost all of his movies
is he takes his shot
at these jackleg preachers.
Jackleg preachers were preachers
that were basically con men...
you know, preachers
that took folks' money...
innocent folks' money...
and kind of used religion
to really manipulate them
and to really steal from them ultimately.
Micheaux was never afraid to sort of...
what could you say?
As one newspaper accused him,
"wash the dirty linen
of the community in public."
It's an important sort of commentary
of black cultural and religious life
when some in the black community
wanted him to.
They wanted a kind of pristine
treatment of black life,
and he didn't want to do that.
He wanted to show some of the complexity
and some of the contradictions and, again,
ways in which they might
have been exploiting each other,
pastors and preachers
exploiting their own people.
He wasn't, like, anti-God or anti-religion.
I think he was a man of faith, actually,
but he saw religion as a tool
being used against
black folks in many ways.
And it very much kind of, you know...
talking about the televangelist
kind of preachers
that will come later on in American life.
The more difficult part
was really the distribution and exhibition
because those sectors were
very quickly taken over
by the big Hollywood studios.
The idea that someone will say, "Here.
Here's what I'm going to do.
I'm also going to get on
the train and bring my movies
to the movie theaters and play them.
I'm going to make sure that they're seen.
I'm not going to wait
on anybody else to do it.
I'm simply going to do it."
Now the amount of person hours
that must have taken
to literally have your film under your arm
and turn up and play it.
He never gets a real great
distribution deal.
He did it all those years
pretty much on his own.
But it was really great how he did it
because he connected with black churches.
He connected with black organizations.
He created a black network
of movie theaters.
♪ Down South, the banjos cry, too ♪
♪ Deep blues, the darkest sky, too ♪
♪ When the moonbeam's on the bayou ♪
♪ That's how rhythm was born ♪
Every major city that had
an African-American community,
there would be cinemas there,
and Micheaux would sort of strike deals
with the owners of these movie theaters
to have their films play
at certain times of the week.
Most of them were white movie theaters
that would allow blacks
to come in after hours,
They called it midnight rambles,
where black folks could come in
often times around 10:00 or 11:00,
maybe even midnight to show a film,
and Micheaux was there,
and black audiences are hungry
to see themselves on the screen.
And not only was he sort of
selling his films
and showing his films himself,
traveling to this network
of black theaters,
but while he was at the theaters,
talking to the managers
about what cut he would get
from the box office and so forth,
he was also making deals
to fund his next films.
He would spend maybe a couple of weeks
in New York, two or three weeks,
then he would take the same print
and then go to Philadelphia,
and from Philadelphia,
maybe go to Pittsburgh,
and from Pittsburgh,
go to Washington... very often
carrying the prints themselves,
you know, from place to place.
And eventually, they would hit
just about every
African-American community.
He would travel and take the film cans...
film prints himself to each location,
sometimes even disguising
the name of the film
to kind of evade the censors
and avoid them cutting up
his original prints.
If Doctor Jalop should augur,
then go see Captain Renfrew.
You know where he lives...
the big house on the hill.
He's responding to
the suffering of black folks
in the nation at the time.
And so the things he wanted to show on film
connected specifically to those issues.
My mother's sick, Doctor.
Who is it?
She's been taken suddenly with...
The fat Negress who lives
in the house on 12th Street.
Isn't she?
No, Caroline Sanders owes me
a $5 doctor bill already.
I'm tired of you Negroes
running up doctor bills
nobody can collect.
Never have any money.
"Within Our Gates," which we
spoke about before, was banned,
I believe in Chicago and maybe
in a couple of other places.
Why? Well, because of course,
it showed a lynching.
All of those things he knew
that he wanted to do were things
that the black audiences
really wanted to see.
He knew that hunger for telling
the real black experience.
He felt that the ways in which
he was being censored,
these were not just affronts
to his artistic vision,
but they were politically motivated.
These were attempts to try
to keep black people
from really feeling
and seeing the weight
of the political messages
that he was including in his films.
And he was resisting that
over and over and over again.
There were some cases in which
he would take the seal
that he got for another film
and put it on a new film
so that it seemed like that one had passed
the censor board when really it hadn't.
He was slapped on the wrist for that.
He made around 40 films.
He did this during a time
when African-Americans
were restricted from so many
different types of activities.
And it is like an archeological dig,
I reference often.
You know, I'd love to sit with all of them.
I'd wish the miracle that
rather than 80 percent
of them are un-found, that maybe
it was the other way 'round...
that 80 percent of them will be found.
Their job was to get the movie made,
try to get it out there best you can,
try to find the audience,
maybe make your money back,
maybe make some money if you were lucky.
It wasn't preserving those films.
Oh, Mr. Hawkins, I see you're here.
Uh, let me take your hat and cane.
You know, Harlem is the
capital of Black America.
And at that time,
it was the most exciting place
for a black person to be in the country.
♪ Chicago's all right,
it's got Wrigley Field ♪
♪ And Soldier's Field and Marshall Field ♪
♪ And it's on a nice lake ♪
♪ But it hasn't got the hansoms
in the park ♪
♪ It hasn't got a skyline after dark ♪
♪ That's why New York's my home ♪
♪ Never let me leave it ♪
♪ New York's my home sweet home ♪
Micheaux probably moved
to New York because Harlem
had become the biggest
black belt in America.
Enjoyable to live
but also is a place where he
could raise money,
meet people.
It allowed him to really
connect to a black audience
and to the black community
in a way he'd never had before.
Intellectually, artistically, politically,
fires were being set.
Inspirations were being
propelled into the mainstream,
into the consciousness
of your fellow man and woman.
So many amazing figures that
came out at that time
that formed a kind of little nucleus,
which we call the Harlem Renaissance.
So he would have been mixing
and mingling with
the cream of the crop of writers
and artists and painters
that were living in Harlem both before,
after, and during the Harlem Renaissance.
It was the only place
in the country like that.
And so he was surrounded by people
trying to do the same thing he was doing.
The thing that's that's
really unique about him
in Harlem, though, is that no one else
is really able to make independent films
the way he did in Harlem.
"Murder in Harlem"... it's another film
that has last-minute surprises
and people popping out of the shadows.
I've been in love with you for a long time.
Come on, little one. Give me a kiss.
And there's Oscar Micheaux, playing
a little role in the movie.
Another one.
"That tall Negro did this.
He will try to lay it on the night."
Big and charming.
"Tall Negro."
"He will try to lay it on the night."
What can it mean?
He's like a P.T. Barnum with his presence.
I'm tall. But why, they...
No, no. They couldn't be
trying to lay this on me.
I don't know anything about it,
except finding a body.
I am a...
Come, we're taking you with us.
Come on.
And there's Oscar Micheaux's wife.
A very, very important person.
Alice B. Russell.
Very refined, very quiet,
in the background,
monitoring and making sure things
are going according to plan.
No need pretending you don't hear me,
'cause I'm gonna fix you anyhow.
It's kind of influenced
by this actual murder
that took place in the South
that had led to the lynching
of a Jewish person.
He took that story
and kind of moves it around
and makes it about,
really, the black community.
There's a wonderful moment in
the film that I love very much,
which is, if you recall,
it starts off with, like, an
African-American night watchman.
And he's going around with
his flashlight and whatever.
Suddenly, the flashlight hits upon
the dead body of a woman.
And suddenly, he does something
which is so amazing.
He just looks at the camera,
and he looks at the camera
for like maybe 10 seconds,
almost as if to say, "Oh, my God.
I'm African-American. She's white.
I'm going to get in trouble."
It's a very modern film in that sense,
that he's responding
to what's happening right at that moment.
And people would... everybody
still does that.
When something big happens in the news,
people immediately
try to capitalize on that
and make a film that
directly speaks to that.
And that's what Micheaux was trying to do.
Sound becomes incorporated
into filmmaking in 1927.
This was a challenge for many filmmakers,
and it was a huge challenge
for independent filmmakers
and certainly black independent filmmakers.
Micheaux was the only one
who could make the transition
from silent filmmaking to sound filmmaking
because he was able
to talk up the financing
to be able to do it.
Micheaux's 1931 film
"The Exile" is the first
black independent sound film.
I kind of think they're all
the same in many ways, you know?
That the novels kind of become
the films in some ways.
A lot of the themes of the novels
end up being in his films.
Based on his second-to-last novel
called "The Wind from Nowhere,"
which is a rewrite of his first novel
and his third novel... again,
his life story on the Rosebud.
Morning, Miss. My name is Baptiste.
I'm calling to see a Mr. Stewart
about hiring his boy.
Is he in?
Yes. Will you come in?
Thanks.
He was always interested in race
in terms of kind of interested
in interracial relationships...
love relationships.
Father, dinner is ready.
Don't let Mr. Baptiste go yet.
Ask him to stay for dinner.
By all means. I'd forgotten.
You must stay for dinner, young man.
That's a common kind of theme
in a lot of his stories.
And I think, you know,
people kind of speculate
that he might have had
a relationship out there in Gregory.
Well, he had a personal
experience on the Rosebud
that deeply affected him.
Now, he was very conscious of laws
that forbade white women to marry black men
or black women to marry white men.
And he finds himself, one day,
getting attracted to someone
whose name we can't be sure of.
We know she exists because
he wrote about her many times.
She was probably Scottish,
the daughter of another settler,
blonde, white.
Sometimes I hardly know whether I'm awake
or dreaming this.
I only know that I'm happy.
Very happy.
Although I've just met you, dear,
you've been in my heart
for years and years.
At some point, he's alone with her,
and they fall into each other's
arms and probably make love.
You are the first one I have ever loved.
Oh, my darling.
Because he's not a prude...
he's not a prudish guy,
and he was very attracted to her.
And this caused him no end of heartbreak
because he felt he couldn't marry her
because it was against the law.
Interracial relationship
was an important issue
for Micheaux, as it is still today,
because it's kind of
that final barrier in many ways,
you know, when interracial
relationships are...
when people have to, in a sense,
accept someone of another race
in their family.
The idea I think Micheaux had
is if you can break
that barrier down in some ways,
everything racially moves forward.
Kiss me.
We know that he also dealt with some
controversial subject matters
like interracial marriage.
But specifically, I think
his treatment of women
is really interesting.
He was telling stories
in the way that we should.
We should give women characters,
obviously, dimension.
We need to give black characters dimension.
And we should offer them complexity.
You know, that's one of
the things that I'm always
really grateful to him for.
Psst!
Sissy!
Sissy!
And I often have an issue
with the phrase, you know,
one is "ahead of their time."
I think Oscar Micheaux was
right where he needed to be
in terms of the way he told his stories.
Moreover, it really is
and was society that was behind the times.
Hello, Mr. Martin. Come right in.
Hello, Bev. How are you?
Fine, Gary. How are you?
Oh, just so-so.
you tell me it is.
It isn't worthwhile. I'm only
going to stay a few minutes.
You can at least sit down.
Well, thank you.
You know, I'm casting a picture.
And I want a girl to play.
Just a touch of life
in one of his Harlem places,
you understand?
I think if you were to say
that Oscar Micheaux
was a silent filmmaker
who never really comfortably
transitioned to sound,
you would not be far off.
If you look at his silent films
the ones that we have...
such as "Within Our Gates,"
"Symbol of the Unconquered,"
"Body and Soul"... they're very fluid,
you know, and they're very inventive,
and he feels really at home with it.
The transition to sound
was really dramatic.
The fact that you couldn't move the camera
with the same kind of freedom.
You wished to see me?
Pardon me, but this is...?
Ida Morton, thank you.
And that there was a kind of
eloquence to silent film,
the nuances of acting,
instead of having to speak up.
Gary Martin.
The motion-picture producer?
Well, something like that, I guess.
Oh, I'm delighted! Glad! Everything!
You know, these early sound films,
people are really loud
and the dialogue seems corny.
Oh, Mr. Martin, whatever can you
wish to speak with me about?
Pictures... motion pictures.
How would you like to work in one?
Oh, how would I like to go
to Heaven without dying?
I think it really paralyzed
Micheaux a little bit, formally.
I think you can draw a direct line
from an Oscar Micheaux to a Spike Lee
to a Sam Pollard to a Shaka King.
And so for young filmmakers,
this is an incredible story
that you can draw inspiration from.
So absolutely, every black filmmaker
has Oscar Micheaux to thank
for opening the door.
I'm working in development on a project now
that is set exactly in the period
that Oscar began making films,
and his work is an important
kind of document
and an important element
of research for me,
to see the world through the eyes
of a black man at the time,
as opposed to the framing
that African-Americans
were given at the time on screen,
which was, outside of Oscar,
always through white people, really.
The winner is Sidney Poitier.
Mr. Poitier is the first Negro
to win such a high award,
and the announcement is received
warmly by the audience.
It is a long journey to this moment.
I am naturally indebted
to countless numbers of people.
For all of them, oh, I should
say a very special thank you.
As America began to
finally move somewhat away
from the sort of segregationist regime
that it was and Hollywood
began to employ people
like Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier
and other very fine
African-American actors...
not only employ them but
to give them dignified roles.
African-American audiences,
as well as others,
flocked to these movies and were
very supportive of the them.
The Civil Rights movement and everything,
looking toward this new amazing opportunity
that's happening and this new,
exciting success
that black folks
are having on the big screen,
it makes Micheaux fade away and disappear.
He was still pretty much saying
the same kinds of things that
he was saying in 1919, 1920,
about lifting yourself
up by the bootstraps,
not necessarily engaged
in a more nuanced critique
of white systems of oppression.
But it's interesting because
it's also the Civil Rights
movement that rediscover him.
People start to want
to honor black history,
and people want to know
kind of where we came from.
And when people started to look back,
one of the first people
they found in a film was,
of course, Oscar Micheaux.
1951, he was 67 years old.
Everybody who saw him in his final years
said he was disheartened, even bitter,
and nearly broke.
♪ I did not become someone different ♪
♪ That I did not want to be ♪
♪ But I'm new here ♪
♪ Will you show me around? ♪
♪ No matter how far wrong you've gone ♪
♪ You can always turn around ♪
We don't know why he
was in Charlotte, where he died.
Knowing Micheaux, even if he was dying,
he was probably selling,
you know, his books.
But it's one of many mysteries about him.
There are mysteries that remain
to be discovered about him,
and I think that's for the next generation.
Okay, Oscar.
All right.
I'm Bernice Gray.
I'm a proud cousin of Oscar Micheaux.
All right.
Now.
You're not perfect, but you're usable.
I may be favored, but I got my flaws.
♪ Mm, mm, mm ♪
♪ Mm, mm ♪
♪ Mm, mm, mm ♪
♪ Mm, mm ♪
And Metropolis is such a podunk today.
It has lost its cachet
as an important little place
in southern Illinois,
that they were desperate
to create some image
for themselves.
And they decided to declare
themselves the home of Superman.
♪ Mm, hmm, hmm, mm ♪
It's typical United States of America.
They will salute fictional
heroes like Superman
or Rocky in Philadelphia,
based on the film,
as opposed to the real people,
especially the real black people
who have lived there.
Oscar Micheaux is the real Superman
because he didn't allow
kryptonite to stop him.
He didn't allow anything to stop him.
And they threw everything they had at him,
and he still was able to get the job done.
The first time I saw Oscar Micheaux,
I was in high school.
I was struck by his direct attitude,
and why was the attitude important?
Because the attitude is
contrary to the stereotype.
He was great before,
but there were barriers to him.
He would be great today.
In all fairness,
you have to fight for history.
You just can't say history
is going to happen.
You have to fight for it
and fight for the memory
because past is past no matter what.
So you've got to fight
for the remembrance of the past.
♪ Your local superhero from the hood ♪
♪ Iron Man Stark's got the good ♪
♪ Not that good-good like Snoop,
I bulletproofed the Coop ♪
♪ Polished up the suit
and gathered the troops ♪
♪ Got a brand new ray gun ♪
♪ Me and DOOM heading down to the range ♪
♪ To shoot in the matrix ♪
♪ Catch bullets with my hands and teeth ♪
♪ I break faces ♪
♪ Wild car chases, don of all ages ♪
♪ I saved the world,
that's fucking history pages ♪
♪ My Wu crescent shines
in the sky at night ♪
♪ Watch how my eagle on my wrist
take off into flight ♪
♪ All my might,
white glass teeth that write ♪
♪ Ain't a bird or a plane,
it's a ghost on the mic ♪
♪ Two hammers and a diamond-blade sword ♪
♪ Thicker than the Ford F-150,
niggas couldn't lift me ♪
♪ As if, stance mad stiff ♪
♪ Metal Face DOOM, beware, he bear gifts ♪
♪ Cab for the shift, overwork, overtime ♪
♪ Jerk, you been warned, go for mine ♪
♪ In the dance hall,
play the wall like handball ♪
♪ Till his pants fall,
brawl till last call ♪
♪ Loose cannon, squeeze drip ♪
♪ Off to rip this one for
the Gipper, get gypped ♪
♪ That nig, ya dig?
Don't tip the strippers ♪
♪ Foamposite mask, matching slippers ♪
♪ Yo, where's Starks? Backpack of ammo ♪
♪ Warriors said,
"Let your flags blow," camo ♪
♪ These dudes is toys like Wham-O ♪
♪ Damn though, chip paint
driving on the gravel ♪
♪ With the Lambo ♪
♪ Blam-o ♪
as the originator of DIY...
do-it-yourself, independent.
He means groundbreaking.
He means freedom and possibilities...
the possibility for me to exist.
Oscar Micheaux means you can do it.
No matter what your environment,
no matter what your time,
you can simply do it.
Oscar Micheaux is the most important
black filmmaker who ever lived.
Period.
We do have an entry in black history...
who made what personally
amounts to his shovel.
He was Spike Lee
before there was Spike Lee.
And this is the 70th anniversary
of his passing.
This mule ain't from Moscow.
This mule ain't from the South.
But this mule's had some learning.
Mostly mouth-to-mouth.
It was very tough for most black families
and black people at that time,
knew what they had to do.
We had come through
the worst of being slaves.
Then there was a civil war.
So stand fast, young Romeo.
Soothe in contemplation
thy burning whole and aching thigh.
Your stubbornness is ever-living
and cruel anxiety is about to die.
So after the aftermath, it was like,
okay, either we're going to
have to learn this well,
do for self, a do or die.
♪ Freedom for your daddy's daddy ♪
♪ Freedom for your mama's mama ♪
♪ Freedom for your brothers and sisters ♪
♪ But no freedom for me ♪
It was difficult for everybody,
but he was determined and quite successful.
You can make it if you try.
If you think Oscar Micheaux,
you think, put your head down
and go forward, and you'll get it done.
I wonder how many know him?
I discovered Oscar Micheaux by by accident.
I was at the Carbondale, Illinois, library
looking at the nonfiction section,
and there's this picture
of him on the cover
that looks compelling.
I start reading that book
and I can't put it down,
and I couldn't believe I hadn't
heard about this man's story.
It's the greatest American story
that nobody knows anything about.
Well, his family came from Kentucky.
They were slaves.
They crossed into southern
Illinois when slaves were freed,
and they started to tend farms
outside a small town
called Metropolis.
Micheaux, because he was
raised in a farm family,
really had this rugged individualism
and this hard work ethic.
He's five of 11 children.
His relationship
with his mother was profound,
and it was profound because
she probably had the ambition
of all of those who were enslaved,
which is one day, not only will we be free,
but we will be equal
and have equity in this land.
His mother was a great admirer
of Booker T. Washington.
Booker T. Washington's great philosophy
was that education would lift
black people up in America.
At Micheaux's time,
there's all these legal barriers
to stop black folks from moving forward.
And education was really
the only thing you could use
to break through some of these barriers,
and Micheaux used it to his full advantage.
He believed in kind of pulling
yourself up by your bootstraps.
He believed in the whole notion
of learning a skill
and combining that with kind of education
and really moving forward with that.
His trajectory from being
a young man, or a teenager even,
was to get out of Metropolis, head north,
where there was opportunity, better money,
and thousands of black people
living in the black belt of Chicago.
He wasn't a slave anymore,
so the fact that a lot of black folks
there were able to be nomadic and travel
and be able to get great experiences
away from being in one place.
That's what also galvanized
a lot of this energy and talent.
Well, Chicago is
kind of exploding at that time.
You know, it is part
of the Great Migration,
a lot of black folks leaving the South
to find the American dream, really.
It was a really powerful community
in the sense that there formed the basis
for a kind of political mobilization
and the creation of vibrant black culture
and black artistic communities.
And so this was a really important space
in which Micheaux could start to imagine
where he can make a name for himself.
I think he was someone who looked forward.
And, you know, in many ways,
the key experience for Micheaux,
I believe, was when he worked
as a Pullman porter
on the American railroads.
Even though they were waiters
and sort of cabin people,
people who made up rooms,
they did, in a sense, mingle
with very high-class white people
and talk to them and get to know them,
and I think Micheaux,
in that experience, said,
"If these people can live like this,
I can live like this and African-Americans
can live like this."
It's no surprise to me that
someone like Micheaux would,
like someone like Malcolm X,
their early life,
their formative years be shaped
by some degree
of working on the train,
working on a railroad.
That's a defining
sort of modernist impulse.
And so Micheaux is a part of that.
He is a part of this ebb
and flow of culture and ideas
and imagination
that the train really embodies.
He met people. He talked to them.
He got books from them.
He learned about society, about politics,
about entertainment in different cities.
It really made him a worldly man,
much more than a lot of people
who spend their lives
entirely in the Midwest.
Pullman porters, at that point in time,
were both like the greatest job
in the world for a black person,
but also the worst job
in the world for a black person.
It's terrible because you
have to pay for your uniform,
all your meals, laundering.
Eventually, you have no money
out of your salary.
One of the things
that all the Pullman porters did
was to sell tickets on board,
it was called, but not report that money
and then sometimes steal money.
He was, in fact,
fired once for taking money.
They believed he took $5.
So what did he do, being Oscar Micheaux?
He went to St. Louis,
where there was another
Pullman porter operation.
He went through the same school
and got hired all over again.
There's no Internet,
they're not checking on him,
and he starts running,
you know, the southern route
in a different Pullman porter route.
He had tremendous American
spirit of "start over again,
let's do it."
He preaches idealism and purity,
and sometimes he's...
is a little tricky over here,
getting things done any way he can.
There was a vast expanse in which
one could imagine one's future was huge.
And then on top of that, Oscar Micheaux
was always a very observant person.
And so as he was working the terrain
and probably doing a lot
of shucking and jiving
and the kind of, like,
performance that one had to do
to get good tips from white passengers,
he was also listening to them,
and he was listening to the conversations
that white businessmen were
having about the opportunities
out West to buy land.
And so he begins to formulate his plans
for becoming a homesteader.
Land was cheap on the roads,
but you had to get the option of bidding
because you were drawn in a lottery.
But if you did, you had a chance
if you had money,
and he knew that,
and so he took that chance.
♪ Dream of a land my soul is from ♪
♪ I hear the hand stroke of a drum ♪
♪ Shades of delight ♪
♪ Cocoa hue ♪
♪ Rich as the night ♪
♪ Afro blue ♪
Micheaux is really unique in that sense.
I mean, he wasn't afraid to be
the only black person
in Gregory, South Dakota.
He wasn't afraid of that,
which a lot of black folks at that time
would have been very frightened about that.
I mean, this is a time
of lynching where black folks
are being lynched all over the country.
Black life is not valued very high.
Land figures extremely
prominently in his imagination
but in the life
of black people of the time,
because many in the South were promised
their 40 acres and a mule
and virtually no one gets that.
Micheaux, again, saw something,
I think, different with that.
It was sort of running through
some of the political theory
and some of the ideology of the time,
so I think land is symbolically important,
but to him, it embodied something more.
He must have been quite a sight
to his neighbors in South Dakota,
and I think at the core was his work ethic.
I mean, even if he was going to
face some kind of social discrimination,
the fact of the matter was that
he put the money together
to buy that land and he worked
that land every day.
Why, Mr. Baptiste,
I've been looking for you all morning.
I'd begun to think that you weren't coming.
I'm sorry, I intended
to be here much sooner,
but something held me up
and I couldn't make it.
I hope you'll pardon the delay.
That's quite all right,
perfectly all right.
Ultimately, he was able to gain
the respect of his neighbors
because he demonstrated in his efforts
that he really was someone
who wanted to make
this project work for him.
And I think the fact that
he was in South Dakota
and had that unique experience out there
with his white neighbors,
that's an experience
that a lot of black folks
did not have at that time.
All agreed, Mr. Baptiste.
He can vote at home and work for you.
And I hope he pleases you.
If he does not, you just tell me
and I'll attend to him.
Oh, that'll never be necessary.
I try to get along
with everyone, Mr. Stewart,
and I'm sure that Bill
and I will make it all right.
Well, I'll be running along now.
I'll look for the boy in the morning.
Father, dinner is ready.
Don't let Mr. Baptiste go yet.
Ask him to stay for dinner.
By all means. I'd forgotten.
You must stay for dinner, young man.
In the meanwhile, meet
my daughter, Miss Agnes,
Mr. Baptiste.
And he also had this
dream that he would share it
with what he called "the one true woman."
He was always looking for
the one true woman in his life.
While he went off in search of women
that he knew in New York, Chicago,
St. Louis, writing them letters,
seeing what they were like,
were they available,
would they like to meet with him,
including his first wife,
that he married out of Chicago
that was disastrous with a
stillborn child on the Rosebud.
And the worst winter
of the several that he
had lived through came.
Frigid snow, then rain that turns to ice.
And he was stuck in his little shack
because you don't go farming.
He was all alone. He felt he was
at the end of his ropes.
And he had always admired writers
like Jack London and novels
like "Martin Eden."
Jack London could write "Martin Eden"
as an autobiographical novel,
that he was going through
this terrible physical struggle,
trying to live on the prairie,
that he, also, had been spurned by women,
that he, too, was also alone
against forces beyond his control.
And he becomes not
Oscar Micheaux, the failed...
landowner of the Rosebud.
He becomes Oscar Micheaux
the successful novelist,
the black novelist telling the true story
of Black American life on the Rosebud.
He took his farming experience,
his experiences as a Pullman porter,
and he kind of translated
that onto the written page.
Then he kind of took the means
to kind of self-publish, as well...
self-publish and
self-distribute these books.
Then he goes to all
these neighbors who he's helped.
He'd go to the local bankers and he'd say,
"You give me a little money, you sign this,
I sell some books,
I give you some money back."
They all invest in his life story.
He turns his first book
into what we guess
is some kind of bestseller.
Good morning, madam.
Having been a Pullman porter,
he knows all these places
in America, in his area.
He starts to travel, and he goes
to the black communities,
and sometimes he's going door-to-door.
"My name is Oscar Micheaux.
I've written this book.
It's my life story."
I have just what you want to be reading.
This is it.
A fine new novel by a Negro author.
Going door-to-door to sell the books.
I think it comes out of
that small-town experience
that he had because
I think it was in
that small-town experience
that he discovered that
you could rely on others
to help you to move your art forward.
And you say it's by a colored author?
What's his name?
I forgot to get his name myself.
Um, here's his picture.
Maybe his name is under it.
He has an intelligent face.
He really wanted to get his message out
to the race as a whole.
And so what better way
than this new medium of cinema?
Not totally new, but new in
the hands of black artists.
Cinema has, I think he recognized,
the ability to mirror.
So when black audiences would
look at other black characters
on the screen, which was rare at the time,
that could give them a different
kind of visual sense
of what they could be.
It's a medium that allows someone
to reflect upon themselves,
their own identities
and their own possibilities.
This is a little bit
before the American cinema
became sort of really
industrialized and corporate.
Still, in the 19-teens,
it was very much a mom-and-pop operation.
There were a lot
of very small film companies.
There were few, as they called them,
Negro film producers
that were feeling that,
you know, "This is
a new accessible technology.
We can make our own stories."
Noble and George Johnson,
who ran the Lincoln Motion Picture Company,
made these really classy, inspiring stories
focused on sort of
the middle and upper classes.
The two African-American brothers,
George and Noble Johnson,
wanted to make a film
of Micheaux's third novel,
and they approached him
and tried to buy the rights,
but they couldn't come up
with enough money,
according to Micheaux.
They must have been like,
"Who is this guy?"
Like, coming from nowhere.
He's got this self-published novel,
and he wants to dictate how
the film is going to be made.
I mean, they're telling him,
you know, maybe it can be two
or three reels, and he's imagining,
no, it's more like seven or eight reels,
and he has never made a film.
The idea is in Oscar Micheaux's head,
"I don't want it to be like a three-reel
or like Noble Johnson's,
and this is all a big movie."
"I could do this,
and I don't need Noble Johnson."
That's the kind of person he was.
He just said, "Oh, I'll make it."
No one really walks off the street
at that point in time in the '20s and '30s
and says, "I'm going to
make a film," right?
You have to have a kind of inroads
into that studio system, largely.
I mean, he would get on the phone
or he would write to people that he knew,
to people that he had charmed.
And he said, "This is my vision.
By hard work alone,
I shall produce this work."
And people bought into that vision.
One of the things
I've always loved about Micheaux
was that independent spirit,
that thing of not letting
anything stop him
from being his artistic self.
He gets a little small crew
and drives out to Gregory,
South Dakota, to shoot a movie.
They've got the cameras in the back seat.
You've got to remember, too,
there's no film school,
no one can teach you how to do this.
I mean, you've got to figure this out
pretty much on your own.
And I think all of that comes from
that experience in South Dakota.
You've got to go out
in the middle of nowhere.
You've got to plant your seed.
You've got to grow the crop,
and then you've got to harvest it,
and then you've got to take it to market.
I mean, he does all of that with film.
Micheaux is like that guy
who's walking down the street
and he's playing the drum,
playing the horns,
playing the keyboard, and he's doing it.
It was sort of crowd filmmaking,
that the people
that are around you
become a part of your practice,
a part of the process.
And that's a very kind of storied practice
in black filmmaking, that you
find people around you
to fund your film, to make your film,
to help you distribute, to travel with you.
I mean, so it is, again,
a community-based model.
That's why he's the patron saint
of black filmmakers,
because he's like the ultimate
independent filmmaker.
Micheaux was a big motion-picture fan,
but he didn't love everything he saw.
He hated "Birth of a Nation."
"Birth of a Nation"
was a real cultural phenomenon.
There had never been a film in
the history of the United States
that had had that kind of impact.
More than any other single work,
"Birth of a Nation"
transformed American cinema
into the American film industry.
Griffith, in his own right,
creates the language of film.
He's the first filmmaker
actually to use the juxtaposition
of close-ups and long shots
and master shots and cutaways,
you know, in simultaneous action.
But he does it in the service
of what I call
a science-fiction film.
Science-fiction films show
the fears of the time.
"Birth of a Nation"
was such a horrendous film
for black folks in America,
and it led to lynchings
that led to the rebirth of the Klan.
And so he tries to respond to
that film the best way he can.
"Within Our Gates" was a film
that kind of tried
to celebrate Black Americans,
especially the black middle class,
and I think that really kind of
turned the narrative
of "The Birth of a Nation" on its head.
The idea that we could
be good, bad, mad, angry...
we could be all kinds of things...
it's a direct response to
the framing of African-Americans
in "Birth of a Nation."
It's a direct answer, which is,
"That's not who we are.
This is who we are."
"The Birth of a Nation"
features the coming together
of the white north and the white south
through romantic relationship.
And Micheaux does the same thing
but with black characters.
A black woman from the South
has a variety of suitors to choose from,
but her relationship
with a doctor from the North
is one way that Micheaux
is demonstrating the kind of
healing of the black community
across regional divides
and a creation of a black uplift marriage
that's going to disprove all of
the things about black people
that "The Birth of a Nation" is suggesting.
He's speaking to the future of the race,
and that is really emphatic.
It doesn't always make for the most...
kind of like escapist viewing experience.
Instead, it's like he's holding
a kind of magnifying glass
to American race relations and
really making you look at things
that you had not appreciated
with the naked eye.
Oscar Micheaux, in 1920,
in doing that film,
getting that onto American movie screens,
having the guts to go out and do that
and show what he thought
was the truth of America
is so far out on the envelope,
it's almost beyond the realm
of what's actually possible,
I think, of that time period.
Audiences were completely stunned.
I was stunned when I saw it 60 years later.
And so we immediately,
as a band at that time,
began to make a record about
this African-American filmmaker.
We started spending
a lot of time with Oscar
and all these films,
and the music was like...
you know.
It was so compelling that it
came out very rapidly.
I think one can see, especially,
the flashback in "Within Our Gates"
as a kind of response to Griffith,
but in a certain way,
to a certain kind of racism
that was very...
unfortunately very present
in the United States.
He was very much wanting to speak back to
a false narrative, a dishonest narrative
that Griffith propagates in his film.
And very much, also, wanting
to create some space
for black people to tell their version
of what often happens,
for instance, with a lynching...
that there is often no crime, right?
He wanted to make sure
that those things were clear.
"Birth of a Nation"
makes lynching of black folks
a positive thing.
And the fact that Micheaux takes
those kind of counter-images
that he constructs himself
and targets them directly back
at "Birth of a Nation"
is a really, really powerful
thing at the time.
When they showed the mob
attack the young boy...
and they hang his parents,
those kind of images...
you know, you've got to understand,
those were very shocking at that time.
In Micheaux's films,
they're not documentary footage,
but they're documentary elements.
These are things
that are happening in society
and to the black community.
And he takes those things and
he weaves them within the story.
"Within Our Gates" is
kind of an example of that.
And Spike does that. You know,
I do that with my films.
Obviously, he didn't do it
the way we did it
in "BlacKkKlansman" or "5 Bloods."
But in essence, it's the same kind of idea.
And I think Micheaux
was one of the first people
to really do that on a major scale.
I think we can get our head around,
in 1919, knowing, you know,
we're in Jim Crow era.
We're in times of mass discrimination
and segregated America.
♪ Swing low ♪
♪ Ooh ♪
♪ Swing low ♪
♪ Ooh ♪
I think what you have to
understand about American racism
is that it was very much built
around the idea of segregation.
That is my school, your school,
my bathroom, your bathroom.
Segregation was about space,
and as long as you stayed in your space,
you could do a fair amount.
Whether it be food, shelter,
clothing, entertainment...
all these things that we said,
"Well, we know what we like.
We don't see this for us.
We're going to see if we can do for self."
♪ Swing low ♪
♪ Sweet chariot, yes ♪
♪ Coming for to carry me home ♪
So, segregation was isolating,
it was restrictive,
it was dangerous, it was scary.
There were tremendous limitations.
But segregation was also,
in many spaces, safety
and comfort and familiarity.
All of the black leaders
and artists and figures
in history during this period,
they found a way to use
segregation to their advantage,
and Micheaux is one of
the best examples of that.
African-Americans were able
to develop, within those spaces,
their own institutions.
So since they had their own theater,
they had their own literature,
they had their own churches,
why not have their own cinema?
So in a way, that's where Micheaux fits in.
Ladies and gentlemen, we're about to open
the primetime revue.
All right, boys, hit it!
Hollywood, for the
most part, is not making,
not telling our story.
They're not making black films.
And so Micheaux has kind of
the corner on the market
in that sense.
He uses that to his advantage.
And so it was kind of the best of times
and the worst of times.
For the Negro people
at the time, to see oneself
or a vision of oneself
that is moving and animated
and giving off life,
you know what I mean, was a phenomenon.
For me, a movie doesn't become a movie
until it meets an audience,
and that's something that Oscar Micheaux
knew and understood.
He was making films
about subjects and issues
that mattered to black people
and that mattered, full stop.
You will not be able to stay home, brother.
You will not be able to plug in,
turn on, and cop out.
You will not be able
to lose yourself on skag
and skip out for beer during commercials
because the revolution
will not be televised.
He was showing history from the
African-American point of view,
and his films are very powerful and modern
in terms of their ideas,
in terms of their style,
and in terms of their budgetary gloss.
Have read that he wasn't a good filmmaker.
I, on the contrary,
and many others think that's
because he was a kind of
almost experimental filmmaker,
that he was really somebody
who played with form
in a very interesting way.
He took what he could borrow
from things that he likes,
so you see scenes in "Body and Soul"
that are very German expressionist.
Very, very striking, especially
when he's doing scenes
with nature and wind storms,
which he loved wind.
So he was very sophisticated,
sometimes in the lighting
and in the composition.
The film that strikes me the most
from Oscar Micheaux's filmography
is "Body and Soul."
I'm a fan of Paul Robeson,
and so to see an early work
by Micheaux of a young Paul Robeson
is incredible to me.
Oh, Micheaux was so good at casting!
He was so good at discovering people.
Paul Robeson... he was an
all-American football player.
He had graduated from law school.
He was already known as a serious actor.
This is about 1923, '24.
Paul Robeson doesn't show up
in other motion pictures
until the early 1930s.
It's Oscar Micheaux
who says, "Paul Robeson.
He's amazing."
In "Body and Soul," we have Paul Robeson
playing these two twins.
And people have different
readings of the film,
but for me, "Body and Soul" represents
people who would prey
on other black people.
That was one of the targets that you see
in almost all of his movies
is he takes his shot
at these jackleg preachers.
Jackleg preachers were preachers
that were basically con men...
you know, preachers
that took folks' money...
innocent folks' money...
and kind of used religion
to really manipulate them
and to really steal from them ultimately.
Micheaux was never afraid to sort of...
what could you say?
As one newspaper accused him,
"wash the dirty linen
of the community in public."
It's an important sort of commentary
of black cultural and religious life
when some in the black community
wanted him to.
They wanted a kind of pristine
treatment of black life,
and he didn't want to do that.
He wanted to show some of the complexity
and some of the contradictions and, again,
ways in which they might
have been exploiting each other,
pastors and preachers
exploiting their own people.
He wasn't, like, anti-God or anti-religion.
I think he was a man of faith, actually,
but he saw religion as a tool
being used against
black folks in many ways.
And it very much kind of, you know...
talking about the televangelist
kind of preachers
that will come later on in American life.
The more difficult part
was really the distribution and exhibition
because those sectors were
very quickly taken over
by the big Hollywood studios.
The idea that someone will say, "Here.
Here's what I'm going to do.
I'm also going to get on
the train and bring my movies
to the movie theaters and play them.
I'm going to make sure that they're seen.
I'm not going to wait
on anybody else to do it.
I'm simply going to do it."
Now the amount of person hours
that must have taken
to literally have your film under your arm
and turn up and play it.
He never gets a real great
distribution deal.
He did it all those years
pretty much on his own.
But it was really great how he did it
because he connected with black churches.
He connected with black organizations.
He created a black network
of movie theaters.
♪ Down South, the banjos cry, too ♪
♪ Deep blues, the darkest sky, too ♪
♪ When the moonbeam's on the bayou ♪
♪ That's how rhythm was born ♪
Every major city that had
an African-American community,
there would be cinemas there,
and Micheaux would sort of strike deals
with the owners of these movie theaters
to have their films play
at certain times of the week.
Most of them were white movie theaters
that would allow blacks
to come in after hours,
They called it midnight rambles,
where black folks could come in
often times around 10:00 or 11:00,
maybe even midnight to show a film,
and Micheaux was there,
and black audiences are hungry
to see themselves on the screen.
And not only was he sort of
selling his films
and showing his films himself,
traveling to this network
of black theaters,
but while he was at the theaters,
talking to the managers
about what cut he would get
from the box office and so forth,
he was also making deals
to fund his next films.
He would spend maybe a couple of weeks
in New York, two or three weeks,
then he would take the same print
and then go to Philadelphia,
and from Philadelphia,
maybe go to Pittsburgh,
and from Pittsburgh,
go to Washington... very often
carrying the prints themselves,
you know, from place to place.
And eventually, they would hit
just about every
African-American community.
He would travel and take the film cans...
film prints himself to each location,
sometimes even disguising
the name of the film
to kind of evade the censors
and avoid them cutting up
his original prints.
If Doctor Jalop should augur,
then go see Captain Renfrew.
You know where he lives...
the big house on the hill.
He's responding to
the suffering of black folks
in the nation at the time.
And so the things he wanted to show on film
connected specifically to those issues.
My mother's sick, Doctor.
Who is it?
She's been taken suddenly with...
The fat Negress who lives
in the house on 12th Street.
Isn't she?
No, Caroline Sanders owes me
a $5 doctor bill already.
I'm tired of you Negroes
running up doctor bills
nobody can collect.
Never have any money.
"Within Our Gates," which we
spoke about before, was banned,
I believe in Chicago and maybe
in a couple of other places.
Why? Well, because of course,
it showed a lynching.
All of those things he knew
that he wanted to do were things
that the black audiences
really wanted to see.
He knew that hunger for telling
the real black experience.
He felt that the ways in which
he was being censored,
these were not just affronts
to his artistic vision,
but they were politically motivated.
These were attempts to try
to keep black people
from really feeling
and seeing the weight
of the political messages
that he was including in his films.
And he was resisting that
over and over and over again.
There were some cases in which
he would take the seal
that he got for another film
and put it on a new film
so that it seemed like that one had passed
the censor board when really it hadn't.
He was slapped on the wrist for that.
He made around 40 films.
He did this during a time
when African-Americans
were restricted from so many
different types of activities.
And it is like an archeological dig,
I reference often.
You know, I'd love to sit with all of them.
I'd wish the miracle that
rather than 80 percent
of them are un-found, that maybe
it was the other way 'round...
that 80 percent of them will be found.
Their job was to get the movie made,
try to get it out there best you can,
try to find the audience,
maybe make your money back,
maybe make some money if you were lucky.
It wasn't preserving those films.
Oh, Mr. Hawkins, I see you're here.
Uh, let me take your hat and cane.
You know, Harlem is the
capital of Black America.
And at that time,
it was the most exciting place
for a black person to be in the country.
♪ Chicago's all right,
it's got Wrigley Field ♪
♪ And Soldier's Field and Marshall Field ♪
♪ And it's on a nice lake ♪
♪ But it hasn't got the hansoms
in the park ♪
♪ It hasn't got a skyline after dark ♪
♪ That's why New York's my home ♪
♪ Never let me leave it ♪
♪ New York's my home sweet home ♪
Micheaux probably moved
to New York because Harlem
had become the biggest
black belt in America.
Enjoyable to live
but also is a place where he
could raise money,
meet people.
It allowed him to really
connect to a black audience
and to the black community
in a way he'd never had before.
Intellectually, artistically, politically,
fires were being set.
Inspirations were being
propelled into the mainstream,
into the consciousness
of your fellow man and woman.
So many amazing figures that
came out at that time
that formed a kind of little nucleus,
which we call the Harlem Renaissance.
So he would have been mixing
and mingling with
the cream of the crop of writers
and artists and painters
that were living in Harlem both before,
after, and during the Harlem Renaissance.
It was the only place
in the country like that.
And so he was surrounded by people
trying to do the same thing he was doing.
The thing that's that's
really unique about him
in Harlem, though, is that no one else
is really able to make independent films
the way he did in Harlem.
"Murder in Harlem"... it's another film
that has last-minute surprises
and people popping out of the shadows.
I've been in love with you for a long time.
Come on, little one. Give me a kiss.
And there's Oscar Micheaux, playing
a little role in the movie.
Another one.
"That tall Negro did this.
He will try to lay it on the night."
Big and charming.
"Tall Negro."
"He will try to lay it on the night."
What can it mean?
He's like a P.T. Barnum with his presence.
I'm tall. But why, they...
No, no. They couldn't be
trying to lay this on me.
I don't know anything about it,
except finding a body.
I am a...
Come, we're taking you with us.
Come on.
And there's Oscar Micheaux's wife.
A very, very important person.
Alice B. Russell.
Very refined, very quiet,
in the background,
monitoring and making sure things
are going according to plan.
No need pretending you don't hear me,
'cause I'm gonna fix you anyhow.
It's kind of influenced
by this actual murder
that took place in the South
that had led to the lynching
of a Jewish person.
He took that story
and kind of moves it around
and makes it about,
really, the black community.
There's a wonderful moment in
the film that I love very much,
which is, if you recall,
it starts off with, like, an
African-American night watchman.
And he's going around with
his flashlight and whatever.
Suddenly, the flashlight hits upon
the dead body of a woman.
And suddenly, he does something
which is so amazing.
He just looks at the camera,
and he looks at the camera
for like maybe 10 seconds,
almost as if to say, "Oh, my God.
I'm African-American. She's white.
I'm going to get in trouble."
It's a very modern film in that sense,
that he's responding
to what's happening right at that moment.
And people would... everybody
still does that.
When something big happens in the news,
people immediately
try to capitalize on that
and make a film that
directly speaks to that.
And that's what Micheaux was trying to do.
Sound becomes incorporated
into filmmaking in 1927.
This was a challenge for many filmmakers,
and it was a huge challenge
for independent filmmakers
and certainly black independent filmmakers.
Micheaux was the only one
who could make the transition
from silent filmmaking to sound filmmaking
because he was able
to talk up the financing
to be able to do it.
Micheaux's 1931 film
"The Exile" is the first
black independent sound film.
I kind of think they're all
the same in many ways, you know?
That the novels kind of become
the films in some ways.
A lot of the themes of the novels
end up being in his films.
Based on his second-to-last novel
called "The Wind from Nowhere,"
which is a rewrite of his first novel
and his third novel... again,
his life story on the Rosebud.
Morning, Miss. My name is Baptiste.
I'm calling to see a Mr. Stewart
about hiring his boy.
Is he in?
Yes. Will you come in?
Thanks.
He was always interested in race
in terms of kind of interested
in interracial relationships...
love relationships.
Father, dinner is ready.
Don't let Mr. Baptiste go yet.
Ask him to stay for dinner.
By all means. I'd forgotten.
You must stay for dinner, young man.
That's a common kind of theme
in a lot of his stories.
And I think, you know,
people kind of speculate
that he might have had
a relationship out there in Gregory.
Well, he had a personal
experience on the Rosebud
that deeply affected him.
Now, he was very conscious of laws
that forbade white women to marry black men
or black women to marry white men.
And he finds himself, one day,
getting attracted to someone
whose name we can't be sure of.
We know she exists because
he wrote about her many times.
She was probably Scottish,
the daughter of another settler,
blonde, white.
Sometimes I hardly know whether I'm awake
or dreaming this.
I only know that I'm happy.
Very happy.
Although I've just met you, dear,
you've been in my heart
for years and years.
At some point, he's alone with her,
and they fall into each other's
arms and probably make love.
You are the first one I have ever loved.
Oh, my darling.
Because he's not a prude...
he's not a prudish guy,
and he was very attracted to her.
And this caused him no end of heartbreak
because he felt he couldn't marry her
because it was against the law.
Interracial relationship
was an important issue
for Micheaux, as it is still today,
because it's kind of
that final barrier in many ways,
you know, when interracial
relationships are...
when people have to, in a sense,
accept someone of another race
in their family.
The idea I think Micheaux had
is if you can break
that barrier down in some ways,
everything racially moves forward.
Kiss me.
We know that he also dealt with some
controversial subject matters
like interracial marriage.
But specifically, I think
his treatment of women
is really interesting.
He was telling stories
in the way that we should.
We should give women characters,
obviously, dimension.
We need to give black characters dimension.
And we should offer them complexity.
You know, that's one of
the things that I'm always
really grateful to him for.
Psst!
Sissy!
Sissy!
And I often have an issue
with the phrase, you know,
one is "ahead of their time."
I think Oscar Micheaux was
right where he needed to be
in terms of the way he told his stories.
Moreover, it really is
and was society that was behind the times.
Hello, Mr. Martin. Come right in.
Hello, Bev. How are you?
Fine, Gary. How are you?
Oh, just so-so.
you tell me it is.
It isn't worthwhile. I'm only
going to stay a few minutes.
You can at least sit down.
Well, thank you.
You know, I'm casting a picture.
And I want a girl to play.
Just a touch of life
in one of his Harlem places,
you understand?
I think if you were to say
that Oscar Micheaux
was a silent filmmaker
who never really comfortably
transitioned to sound,
you would not be far off.
If you look at his silent films
the ones that we have...
such as "Within Our Gates,"
"Symbol of the Unconquered,"
"Body and Soul"... they're very fluid,
you know, and they're very inventive,
and he feels really at home with it.
The transition to sound
was really dramatic.
The fact that you couldn't move the camera
with the same kind of freedom.
You wished to see me?
Pardon me, but this is...?
Ida Morton, thank you.
And that there was a kind of
eloquence to silent film,
the nuances of acting,
instead of having to speak up.
Gary Martin.
The motion-picture producer?
Well, something like that, I guess.
Oh, I'm delighted! Glad! Everything!
You know, these early sound films,
people are really loud
and the dialogue seems corny.
Oh, Mr. Martin, whatever can you
wish to speak with me about?
Pictures... motion pictures.
How would you like to work in one?
Oh, how would I like to go
to Heaven without dying?
I think it really paralyzed
Micheaux a little bit, formally.
I think you can draw a direct line
from an Oscar Micheaux to a Spike Lee
to a Sam Pollard to a Shaka King.
And so for young filmmakers,
this is an incredible story
that you can draw inspiration from.
So absolutely, every black filmmaker
has Oscar Micheaux to thank
for opening the door.
I'm working in development on a project now
that is set exactly in the period
that Oscar began making films,
and his work is an important
kind of document
and an important element
of research for me,
to see the world through the eyes
of a black man at the time,
as opposed to the framing
that African-Americans
were given at the time on screen,
which was, outside of Oscar,
always through white people, really.
The winner is Sidney Poitier.
Mr. Poitier is the first Negro
to win such a high award,
and the announcement is received
warmly by the audience.
It is a long journey to this moment.
I am naturally indebted
to countless numbers of people.
For all of them, oh, I should
say a very special thank you.
As America began to
finally move somewhat away
from the sort of segregationist regime
that it was and Hollywood
began to employ people
like Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier
and other very fine
African-American actors...
not only employ them but
to give them dignified roles.
African-American audiences,
as well as others,
flocked to these movies and were
very supportive of the them.
The Civil Rights movement and everything,
looking toward this new amazing opportunity
that's happening and this new,
exciting success
that black folks
are having on the big screen,
it makes Micheaux fade away and disappear.
He was still pretty much saying
the same kinds of things that
he was saying in 1919, 1920,
about lifting yourself
up by the bootstraps,
not necessarily engaged
in a more nuanced critique
of white systems of oppression.
But it's interesting because
it's also the Civil Rights
movement that rediscover him.
People start to want
to honor black history,
and people want to know
kind of where we came from.
And when people started to look back,
one of the first people
they found in a film was,
of course, Oscar Micheaux.
1951, he was 67 years old.
Everybody who saw him in his final years
said he was disheartened, even bitter,
and nearly broke.
♪ I did not become someone different ♪
♪ That I did not want to be ♪
♪ But I'm new here ♪
♪ Will you show me around? ♪
♪ No matter how far wrong you've gone ♪
♪ You can always turn around ♪
We don't know why he
was in Charlotte, where he died.
Knowing Micheaux, even if he was dying,
he was probably selling,
you know, his books.
But it's one of many mysteries about him.
There are mysteries that remain
to be discovered about him,
and I think that's for the next generation.
Okay, Oscar.
All right.
I'm Bernice Gray.
I'm a proud cousin of Oscar Micheaux.
All right.
Now.
You're not perfect, but you're usable.
I may be favored, but I got my flaws.
♪ Mm, mm, mm ♪
♪ Mm, mm ♪
♪ Mm, mm, mm ♪
♪ Mm, mm ♪
And Metropolis is such a podunk today.
It has lost its cachet
as an important little place
in southern Illinois,
that they were desperate
to create some image
for themselves.
And they decided to declare
themselves the home of Superman.
♪ Mm, hmm, hmm, mm ♪
It's typical United States of America.
They will salute fictional
heroes like Superman
or Rocky in Philadelphia,
based on the film,
as opposed to the real people,
especially the real black people
who have lived there.
Oscar Micheaux is the real Superman
because he didn't allow
kryptonite to stop him.
He didn't allow anything to stop him.
And they threw everything they had at him,
and he still was able to get the job done.
The first time I saw Oscar Micheaux,
I was in high school.
I was struck by his direct attitude,
and why was the attitude important?
Because the attitude is
contrary to the stereotype.
He was great before,
but there were barriers to him.
He would be great today.
In all fairness,
you have to fight for history.
You just can't say history
is going to happen.
You have to fight for it
and fight for the memory
because past is past no matter what.
So you've got to fight
for the remembrance of the past.
♪ Your local superhero from the hood ♪
♪ Iron Man Stark's got the good ♪
♪ Not that good-good like Snoop,
I bulletproofed the Coop ♪
♪ Polished up the suit
and gathered the troops ♪
♪ Got a brand new ray gun ♪
♪ Me and DOOM heading down to the range ♪
♪ To shoot in the matrix ♪
♪ Catch bullets with my hands and teeth ♪
♪ I break faces ♪
♪ Wild car chases, don of all ages ♪
♪ I saved the world,
that's fucking history pages ♪
♪ My Wu crescent shines
in the sky at night ♪
♪ Watch how my eagle on my wrist
take off into flight ♪
♪ All my might,
white glass teeth that write ♪
♪ Ain't a bird or a plane,
it's a ghost on the mic ♪
♪ Two hammers and a diamond-blade sword ♪
♪ Thicker than the Ford F-150,
niggas couldn't lift me ♪
♪ As if, stance mad stiff ♪
♪ Metal Face DOOM, beware, he bear gifts ♪
♪ Cab for the shift, overwork, overtime ♪
♪ Jerk, you been warned, go for mine ♪
♪ In the dance hall,
play the wall like handball ♪
♪ Till his pants fall,
brawl till last call ♪
♪ Loose cannon, squeeze drip ♪
♪ Off to rip this one for
the Gipper, get gypped ♪
♪ That nig, ya dig?
Don't tip the strippers ♪
♪ Foamposite mask, matching slippers ♪
♪ Yo, where's Starks? Backpack of ammo ♪
♪ Warriors said,
"Let your flags blow," camo ♪
♪ These dudes is toys like Wham-O ♪
♪ Damn though, chip paint
driving on the gravel ♪
♪ With the Lambo ♪
♪ Blam-o ♪