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"He grew up in a time when it was believed you couldn't spell if you were Black, and he challenged that myth" :: Oscar Micheaux links, YouTube clips

Oscar Micheaux has more claim to the title of being the Godfather of American Indie Film than John Cassavetes - in my opinion - since Micheaux had no choice but to work outside of Hollywood in both production & distribution, due to the racism & segregation of his time, & even with those significant limitations he built a decades spanning career (1919 - 1948)/created at least 33 films. Here's an interview about Micheaux at AmericanHeritage.com, with Patrick McGilligan - author of Oscar Micheaux: The Great & Only - The Life of America's First Black Filmmaker. From the interview:

"Do enough of Micheaux’s films survive to give us an accurate sense of his ability as a director? Is there anyone in mainstream Hollywood you might compare him to?

Only about one third of Micheaux’s nearly four dozen films survive, and those that do survive exist in truncated form, largely because Micheaux could not afford to manufacture numerous prints of his films, and the handful that circulated were diminished by censorship and by usage. His first heyday was the silent era, and those films are the rarest. However, two of his most famous silent pictures survive in fair condition: The Symbol of the Unconquered, from 1920, and Body and Soul, from 1925, the first motion picture to star Paul Robeson. Judging these two films on content and style, they are indeed stellar works. Content-wise because they depict black America at a time when Hollywood didn’t have a clue, and because they touch on important racially-sensitive issues—from Southern peonage and lynching to religious hypocrisy and miscegenation. Style-wise, in spite of low-budget limitations, they are very sophisticated films, showing the influences of both German Expressionist and Soviet editing ideas."

Read the rest here.



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Check out the YouTube clips of a doc called Oscar Micheaux and Race Movies. The quote I used at the title of this post comes from clip #3.
















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Introduce us to your favorite painters & paintings.

There's a PBS (i think) show on French painters right now. Other, older, forms of art, & the people who made them, can be inspirational & useful for filmmakers I think. I've learned a lot from indie rock (some aesthetic stuff, lots of bidness stuff), maybe I can learn stuff from painting too. So in July & August I am going to blog about painters & I would like you to comment & tell us about your favorite painters & other interesting stuff about painting. Painting is thousands of years old. Filmmaking is a little over 100 years old. US Indie filmmaking as we know it is perhaps a little over 50 years old (w/ the beginning somewhere around the time when the Cassavetes generation got its inspiration/started work). Us new indie filmmakers - the digital/web/DIY generation, can probably learn a lot by taking a look at/getting to know, painting & other older art forms. I'll start w/ Edward Hopper . Here's page w/ a lot of info on him. His most famou...

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