Writing Himself into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films, and His Audiences, and: Straight Lick: The Cinema of Oscar Micheaux (review)

Book Reviews | Regular Feature Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence. Writing Himselfinto History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films, and His Audiences. Rutgers University Press, 2000. 288 pages; $20.00. J. Ronald Green. Straight Lick: The Cinema of Oscar Micheaux. Indiana University Press, 2000. 295 pages; $29.95. Progressive Figure With over forty motion pictures to his credit, Oscar Micheaux was the most imporfrace and ethnicity in the cinema, it is easy to see why scholars are resurrecting Micheaux. The task, however, is not an easy one as only a quarter ofhis screenplays survive and primary evidence related to his life and career is scarce. For over a decade, Joseph A. Young's Black Novelist as White Racist: The Myth ofBlack Inferiority in the Novels ofOscar Micheaux (1989) stood alone as the only scholarly monograph devoted to Micheaux. (The book's argument is immediately discernible from its title.) Boswer and Spence's Writing Himselfinto History and Green's Straight Lick serve to debunk much of whatYoung has to say about Micheaux's ideas on race. These new books present a complex artist and entrepreneur who used his films to combat racial stereotypes and to criticize those practices and beliefs prevalent within the African American community that he saw as destructive. Boswer, Spence, and Green carefully weigh the evidence and discredit the popular notion that Micheaux exercised his own color prejudice by casting lighter skinned blacks as heroes and darker skinned blacks as villains. It simply was not the case. Also, Green points out that while Micheaux was an admirer of the conservative blackreformerBookerT. Washington, he was not— as Young suggests—single-mindedly devoted to Washington's philosophy which stressed vocational training for blacks over gaining political freedoms. In reinterpreting Micheaux as apolitically progressive figure , Green, Boswer, and Spence add much to our appreciation of the social meanings of Micheaux's titles. AU three scholars stress that the filmmaker was motivated by a desire to contribute to the uplifting of his race and that he felt motion pictures were a useful tool for moral and social betterment. Green offers intelligent readings of Micheaux's movies in order to demonstrate how the filmmaker subtly used minstrelsy characters not to further promote racist stereotypes but to offer them up for scrutiny and ridicule. Boswer and Spence dig deep into the historical record to develop the social context in which Micheaux made his films and audiences received them. They show how critics and audiences looked to black-made movies for dignified depictions ofAfricanAmericans that would counter the effects ofharmful images of the race prevalent in white-produced pictures of the time. Not surprisingly, Bowser and Spence's research reveals that vocal members of the African American community wanted what many groups ofpeoples represented on the screen at this time desired: to be depicted fairly and positively. While Boswer and Spence add much to our appreciation of the social and historical contexts of Micheaux's work and Green offers provocative interpretations of his films, the man himself remains little understood. He is at best a specter floating in and out of the pages of Writing HimselfInto History and Straight Lick. Boswer and Spence provide us with the most biographical information of either book in a chapter called "Writing Himself into History." They treat Micheaux's experience as a homesteader in South Dakota, his time spent writing and promoting his novels on tours throughout the South, and the establishment ofhis own studio in order to produce a film ofhis third novel The Homesteader (1919). Yet, as they explain, they wish not to tell the filmmaker's life story but to excavate his "biographical legend," to explore the "texts" that make up the "construct 'Micheaux'." Myth, fiction, fantasy, and fact are all tossed together and that which may be true is difficult to distinguish from that which is true. We learn, for example, that the filmmaker's first novels are largely autobiographical, but it remains unclear which elements are factual and which fanciful. In his introduction, Green explains that he too wishes not to offer a biography of Micheaux or even, for that matter, a history of his films but an analysis and critical assessment of his "accomplishment in...