Building an Empire

J. Hoberman

• Writing Himself into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films and His Audiences by Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence
  Rutgers, 280 pp, £38.95, August 2000, ISBN 0 8135 2803 8
• Straight Lick: The Cinema of Oscar Micheaux by J. Ronald Green
  Indiana, 368 pp, £21.95, August 2000, ISBN 0 253 33753 4

The 20th century is over but the aesthetic returns are far from counted. Take the case of the novelist and film-maker Oscar Micheaux (1884-1951). The most prolific director of so-called race movies and the forebear of American independent cinema, Micheaux is one of the most significant American film-makers – as well as one of the most obscure. Hardly known outside the world of film history and African American studies, Micheaux has over the past decade become a small scholarly industry, the subject of academic conferences, a regular newsletter and an annual film series. A documentary of his life has been shown a number of times on public television in the US; last autumn, the New York Film Festival presented a restored print of his best-known silent, Body and Soul (1925), with a new jazz score performed by the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. (Max Roach has composed music for another Micheaux silent, The Symbol of the Unconquered.) There are now the two books and at least two more are on the way.