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Oscar Micheaux
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O[S]car Micheaux is one of the most influential figures in African-American silent cinema. The most prolific filmmaker of the silent period, he remained in the industry longer than any other black director. Micheaux's achievements are remarkable considering the economic and artistic obstacles African-American filmmakers faced—and they were not limited to his producing over twenty-eight films in the silent era or to his financial juggling skills. Micheaux used his filmmaking to openly challenge the racial injustices which African-Americans faced at the beginning of the twentieth century. Lynching, job discrimination, interracial rape, mob violence, and economic exploitation were all explored cinematically by the filmmaker. From his first film The Homesteader (1919), Micheaux addressed sensitive issues which other motion picture producers dared not face.
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Though independent filmmaker Oscar Micheaux was an important and prolific contributor to early black American cinema, his work has been largely ignored by film historians. Part of this is due to the fact that few of the forty films he made between 1919 and 1948 have survived, but it is ... due to his controversial racial messages and the technical inferiority of his films that have made him hard to integrate into standard histories. Prior to becoming a filmmaker Micheaux worked as a shoeshine boy, a farm worker, and a Pullman porter. By 1913, Micheaux was running a 500 acre South Dakota homestead and had written, published and promoted The Conquest, a semi-autobiographical novel -- he would go on to write ten more. In 1918, the Lincoln Film Company, one of the first all-black studios, offered to film one of his novels, The Homesteader (1917). But negotiations broke down and Micheaux decided to make it himself.
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[One] pioneering black artist, the filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, has likewise lurked in the shadows for most of the 55 years since his death. He was one of the most prolific film-makers of the 1920s and 30s, making some 40 "race pictures". When he died it seemed that all his efforts died with him: his six novels were out of print and his movies were scattered to the winds, to the furnace, and the foreclosure auction. In 1951, he vanished into a pauper's grave.
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Oscar Micheaux is legendary as one of the first black filmmakers. Never afraid of taking risks, he founded his own company, writing, producing, and directing thirty-some silents and talkies from 1919 to 1948. Earlier, he had published a series of remarkable novels — in 1917 The Homesteader, which would be filmed twice. Autobiographical, The Homesteader expands on and continues the life of a black pioneer first described in The Conquest (... a Bison Book). In this incarnation, Jean Baptiste is his name. He has just purchased land in South Dakota when he meets his "dream girl," but to his mind marriage is impossible because she is white.
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Peterson, Bernard L."The Films of Oscar Micheaux: America's First Fabulous Black Filmmaker." Crisis 1979 86(4): 136-141."Between 1918 and 1948, Oscar Micheaux wrote, produced, and directed more than 40 feature films. He was born in Metropolis, Illinois on January 2, 1884. He wrote melodramatic novels and formed his own film company. He toured the nation with scripts, persuading theater managers to give him an advance against future bookings. He ... had capital and show dates before production.
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Both of Oscar Micheaux's parents were born in Kentucky from former slaves. From his parental union came thirteen children. The Micheauxs moved to Metropolis, Illinois where Oscar was born on January 22, 1884. Oscar was not fond of living and working on his parents' farm, therefore he moved at age 17 to Chicago and stayed with an older brother who worked with the Chicago railroad as a pullman porter. Eventually, Oscar worked as a pullman porter ... and accumulated enough money to move and buy a ranch in eastern South Dakota in the year of 1905. Oscar married in 1910 and was divorced two years later.
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Oscar Micheaux