September 23, 2020, Film History / Historiography, week 3.
Sept 23 Silent film histories from Edison to Micheaux to Flaherty
Guest speaker: Charles Musser
Read: Allyson Nadia Field, “Introduction,” Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity (Duke U Press, 2015), 1-31 (especially “A Manifesto for Looking at Lost Film,” 23-31).
Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, “‘We Were Never Immigrants’: Oscar Micheaux and the Reconstruction of Black American Identity,” in Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (U of California Press, 2005), 219-44.
Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence, “Oscar Micheaux’s The Symbol of the Unconquered: Text and Context,” in Oscar Micheaux and His Circle: African-American Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era, ed. Pearl Bowser, Jane Gaines, and Charles Musser (Indiana U Press, 2001), 81-96.
Charles Musser, “To Redream the Dreams of White Playwrights: Reappropriation and Resistance in Oscar Micheaux’s Body and Soul ,” in Oscar Micheaux and His Circle, 97-131 (especially 97-101 and 119-31).
Paul Moore, “A ‘Distant Reading’ of the ‘Chaser Theory’: Local Views and the Digital Generation of New Cinema History.” In Technology and Film Scholarship. Experience, Study, Theory, ed. Santiago Hidalgo (Amsterdam U Press, 2018), 169-84, doi: 10.5117/9789089647542/ch07
Charles Musser, “Problems in Historiography: The Documentary Tradition Before Nanook of the North,” in The Documentary Film Book, ed. Brian Winston (BFI, 2013), 119-28.
Watch: Two by Oscar Micheaux:
Within Our Gates (1919) 74 min. Music by Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky.
The Symbol of the Unconquered: A Story of the Ku Klux Klan (1920) 60 min. Music by Max Roach.
Recommended viewing:
Body and Soul (1925) with Paul Robeson. Music by Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky. 93 min. Clip, 55:30 to 59:00: Isabelle tells her mother the truth about Rev. Jenkins.
Bonus: The Films of Oscar Micheaux (Bret Wood, 2016) with Musser. 8 min.
Bonus: Pioneers of African-American Cinema: An Introduction (Bret Wood, 2016) with Stewart and Musser. 7 min.
Bonus fun one: The Symbol of the Unconquered Abridged (2020) 5 min. (Also embedded above.)
Bonus fun too: Accidental glitch art video, MP4 file from that time I digitized a nearly twenty-year-old DVD: The Origins of Film, Disc 1. The African American Cinema I: Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates (1919), Library of Congress Video Collection, New York: Unapix Entertainment, distributed by Image Entertainment, 2000. (The first commercial DVDs were released in 1997.)
“Divine justice punishes the real killer.”
