Oscar Micheaux essays

Oscar Micheaux essays In the years of race cinema, there was only one black man with the determination to write, produce, direct, finance and distribute his own films. That man was Oscar Micheaux. Micheaux was the first black to direct a silent feature, and the first to direct a talkie feature. In so many ways, Micheaux was the D.W. Griffith of race cinema. Many of Micheauxs films exhibited aesthetic techniques originally used by D.W. Griffith, particularly in Griffiths racial movie The Birth of A Nation (1915). On the other hand, many of Micheauxs films also show improvements on Griffiths techniques and responses to his racially driven movie. Even though Oscar Micheaux was the first of his kind, he did not create a new movie sub-genre; but was able to show the power of the black movie maker by being the first black to make films that were aesthetically competitive with white filmmakers, and by making films that contradicted films such as Birth of a Nation by showing the power of black filmmakers in r esponding to mainstream cinema. Existing not only as an artist in the film industry, Griffith was a business man as well. Known for spending unusually large amounts of money on films such as Birth of a Nation (1915) and Hearts of the World (1918) and then realizes that, while the returns from such a subject are slowly accruing, he must turn out a few pot-boilers to keep the wolf from the door. (Milne 79) Therefore, Griffith produced many smaller scale productions films such as The Great Love (1918) and The Girl Who Stayed at Home (1919). Similarly, having to produce his own films through his own production company, Micheaux was also very much a business man. As stated, raising funds knocking on doors, Micheax also produced smaller films such as The Gunsaulus Mystery (1921) and The Hypocrite (1922) to pay the bills while he worked on his larger scale productions (even though they were shoe-string budgets). ...