In a prolific career that spanned more than three decades (1919-1951), the pioneering black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux made nearly 45 movies. Today, only 15 are still in circulation, and two of them were found as recently as two years ago.
“Micheaux was a very important director from both cultural and technical points of view,” says Jan-Christopher Horak, a curator for the George Eastman House, a museum of photography in Rochester, N.Y. “Each discovery adds to our understanding of how he told stories to mainly black audiences. And it helps us gauge the impact of race movies.”
In summer 1991 a print of Micheaux’s 1932 sound feature “Veiled Aristocrats,” long believed lost, was discovered in a cache of old films stored in a garage in Tennessee. The delicate nitrate reels were donated to the Eastman’s archive for preservation.
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The restored version of “Veiled Aristocrats,” about 55 minutes long and with several obvious gaps in the narrative, will be shown for the first time since the ’30s when it’s screened at the Art Institute Film Center on Thursday and Sunday.
It is typical of Micheaux’s output, according to Pam Thomas, producer of “Midnight Ramble,” a documentary about Micheaux and race movies that is to air on PBS next fall. “It’s another morality play in which he preaches about issues confronting blacks in his time. In `Within Our Gates,’ made in 1919, he dealt with lynching. In this one, the subject matter is passing (for white), which was an obsession with him,” she says.
Adapted from a turn-of-the-century novel, “Veiled Aristocrats” traces an older brother’s attempt to take his similarly light-skinned sister into white society where he has gained success passing as a white lawyer. In the novel, the sister dies at the end, a tragic mulatto figure unable to fit into either world. Micheaux, however, daringly changed her into an independent-minded heroine who returns to her dark-skinned beau and remains true to her roots. Between the “sermons,” he cunningly inserted several song-and-dance numbers to entertain.
“Micheaux knew how to tap into his audience’s fantasies and ambivalent feelings,” Thomas says. “He made most of his important films during the time when blacks migrated to the North en masse. On the one hand, he and other race movie directors pointed to the stable lifestyle of the urban white middle class as a model for rural blacks to emulate. Their movies showed black folks getting an education and making money in Northern cities.
“The message was uplifting. That’s why they were popular. They helped counter the negative stereotypes in mainstream cinema, and they provided blacks with dreams in their own theaters. (But) his films were always controversial, with both whites and blacks.”
And they were subjected to censorship. “His strong following in the black community was perceived as a threat,” explains film historian Floyd Webb. “He didn’t shy away from attacking sensitive issues. The lynching scene in `Within Our Gates’ made the city fathers in Chicago cringe. Yet he was often criticized by the black press too. Even the Chicago Defender, among others, didn’t endorse his use of light-skinned actors, such as Lorenzo Tucker, the Black Valentino, in `Veiled Aristocrats.’ “
Micheaux, Thomas and Webb agree, was an ace entrepreneur and self-promoter, the most successful and influential black filmmaker before Spike Lee. A native of Metropolis, Ill., he first sought his fortune in Chicago. He wrote novels and became a publisher. Through a circuitous route, he got into the movie business. In 1919, his ambitious debut film, “The Homesteader,” the first feature-length film to be written, directed and produced by an African-American, launched a lengthy though difficult career.
“Had he been white, Micheaux would rank as a great artist,” Thomas observes. “But he didn’t have the resources. His films often have a rough-hewn, secondhand quality. Many of his actors were amateurs. As the black audiences became more sophisticated and segregation came to an end, they turned away from race movies.
“Micheaux, however, was determined. He had stories to tell. He struggled hard to raise money. He even went to Europe and South America to promote his films.
“Maybe that’s where we can find more Micheaux movies.”