No longer 'on the outside looking in' : Oscar Micheaux's role in the construction of a black American film form

Abstract

This thesis investigates the part played by Oscaz Micheaux's Ghns, between 1919 and 1939, in the construction of a black American film form, whose narrative system responded to the concerns of African Americans in a style that diverged from traditional Hollywood cinematic forms. As well as studying Micheaux's extant films, this thesis examines black newspapers from the 1920s and 1930s to identify trends in public discourse within the African American, urban communities of Harlem and Chicago, thus allowing an understanding of Micheaux's reception context and socio- cultural context. Although research on Micheaux's work has become more common in recent years, little work has been done on the effect that Hollywood black cast movies had on his films' reception and on the part played by the black press in influencing public reaction to his movies. Nor has any attention been paid to the way in which Micheaux employed public discourse in his narratives or the manner in which his films played with forms developed in white culture to create a new cinematic form, more appropriate to the telling of African American stories. This thesis contributes to Micheaux scholarship in several substantive ways. In it, I look at the role played by the black press, particularly the New York Amsterdam NeM's, in the development of a black American film form, focusing on the paper's contrasting treatment of Micheaux's work and Hollywood's black-cast movies of the early sound period. I then consider the ways in which Micheaux's films developed a narrative system that reflected upon prevalent debates in the black newspapers, particularly those debates that centred on the nature of African American identity. This leads to the exploration of the manner in which Micheaux's film narratives responded to this discourse and, in the process, constructed a positive racial identity fbr his audience. My research also concentrates on the ways that Micheaux expropriated elements of two traditionally 'white' modes of representation, minstrelsy and melodrama, to construct a narrative system and style that rewrote the AMcan American past and present from a new, African American perspective. To conclude, I explore the convergence of Micheaux's film form, as evidenced in the previous chapters' discussion, with that devised by blaxploitation era African American filmmakers, to argue that Micheaux should be regarded as their cinematic ancestor who developed a film form that spoke for, and to, African Americans alone.

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