Description
Book SynopsisOne of the most original and successful filmmakers, Oscar Micheaux was born into a rural, working-class, African-American family in mid-America in 1884. Micheaux's work was founded upon the concern for class mobility, or uplift, for African Americans. This book is a critical assessment of Micheaux's accomplishment in the art of cinema.
Trade ReviewUntil recently the name Oscar Micheaux might have provoked the question Oscar who? But scholars have now begun to look at this pioneering African American moviemaker. This volume joins Betti Carol VanEpps-Taylor's biography Oscar Micheaux: Dakota Homesteader, Author, Pioneer Filmmaker (1998) and Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence's Writing Himself into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films, and His Audiences (CH, Mar'01), attesting to the intellectual rigor of this trend. Though Green's study is most in the mold of a literary critique, the paucity of Micheaux sources obligates all three authors to write as historians, cultural critics, anthropologists, and decoders. In the absence of script drafts, interoffice memos, gossip columns, memoirs, reviews, and handy prints of films—the stuff of mainstream cinema history—Green (Ohio State Univ.) sets up a critical landscape that allows the reader to sense the density of the culture out of which Micheaux's work arose while also citing sources of his own theoretical modeling. That said, any Micheaux film demands a great deal of creative dissection, which Green provides. He makes uncommonly good use of frame enlargements and stills and provides a thoughtful index and a thorough bibliography. For serious undergraduate students and scholars.
-- T. Cripps * formerly, Morgan State University , 2001mar CHOICE. *
Table of ContentsContents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Micheaux v. Griffith
2. Micheaux's Class Position
3. Twoness and Micheaux's Style
4. Negative Images
5. The Middle Path
6. Middle?Class Cinema
7. White Financing
8. Stereotype and Caricature
9. Revising Caricature
10. Interrogating Caricature as Entertainment
11. Interrogating False Uplift
12. Passing and Film Style
13. Racial Loyalty
14. Micheaux and Cinema Today
Appendix One: On Class and the Classical
Appendix Two: Filmography
Appendix Three: Selections from the Black Press
Appendix Four: Bibliography
Notes
Index
