One of the most original and successful filmmakers of all time, Oscar Micheaux was born into a rural, working-class, African-American family in mid-America in 1884. He was not formally educated beyond the most modest and basic public schooling he was subjected all his life to race and class prejudice and yet he created an impressive legacy in one of the most sophisticated, expensive, and fragile cultural endeavours of the twentieth century – commercial cinema. Between 1913 and 1951 he wrote, directed, and distributed some forty-three feature films, more than any other black filmmaker in the world, a record of production that is likely to stand for a very long time.
In African-American circles, the legend of Oscar Micheaux has persisted since the 1910s. Now stories of Micheaux's life and work are extending into the rest of American culture through film festivals, museum and university film programs and publications, and broadcasting – even into the Phil Donahue Show. This book is a critical assessment of Micheaux's accomplishment in the art of cinema.
Micheaux's work was founded upon the concern for class mobility, or uplift, for African Americans. Uplift provided the context for Micheaux''s extensive commentary on racist cinema, such as D. W. Griffith's 1915 blockbuster, The Birth of a Nation, which Micheaux answered" with his very early films Within Our Gates and Symbol of the Unconquered. Uplift explains Micheaux's use of "negative images" of African Americans as well as his multi-pronged campaign against stereotype and caricature in American culture. His campaign produced a body of films saturated with a nuanced intertexual "signifying," boldly and repeatedly treating controversial topics that face white censorship time after time, topics ranging from white mob and Klan violence to light-skin- colour fetish to white financing of black cultural productions.
Micheaux's underfinanced films with their necessarily low production values, combined with his thematic concern for the political economics of representation, resulted in a virtually unique phenomenon – a large corpus of materially and philosophically middle-class films. In our own era of 200-million dollar films made for the middle class, Micheaux's legacy of inexpensive films made for and by the middle class is a model that deserves more attention.