Review of Criterion's "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World"

The new Blu-ray/DVD release of the Criterion Collection's "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" is here:  http://www.cinemaretro.com/index.php/archives/7877-REVIEW-CRITERIONS-ITS-A-MAD,-MAD,-MAD,-MAD-WORLD-1963-FIVE-DISC-RELEASE.html

Review of Criterion's "Rififi" and "Throne of Blood"

My review of the new Blu-ray releases  of RIFIFI and THRONE OF BLOOD, from The Criterion Collection, is up at Cinema Retro : http://www.cinemaretro.com/index.php/archives/7861-REVIEW-CRITERION-RELEASES-JULES-DASSINS-RIFIFI-1955-AND-KUROSAWAS-THRONE-OF-BLOOD-1957.html

Film History Student Final Paper #3 - Federico Fellini

I am fortunate to teach Film/Video Production History in the Motion Picture/TV Department at the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. At the end of each semester, the students (who range from ages 18 - 21, usually) are required to write a paper about an auteur filmmaker of their choice. They are to provide an overview of the filmmaker's career and identify specific stylistic and/or thematic traits in his/her work that are "signatures," i.e. the things that make the filmmaker an auteur. I ask the students to write the paper in an informal, conversational tone, as if they are telling a story to a young person who knows nothing about the subject.  

I have picked three papers out of the bunch that I feel are worthy to be published here on my blog.

Third Paper:  FEDERICO FELLINI, written by JOSH MACNEAL

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Fellini: The Life of Cinema

Federico Fellini, my favorite director (tied with Kubrick) once said in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine that “Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second and you can hop from one place to another. It’s a language made of image. And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream” (Rolling Stone, no.421, 1984). Fellini solidifies an aesthetic I appreciate in my work and others, which is the blur between reality and whimsical fantasy.

He was a film director and screenwriter known specifically for his unique style that blended baroque visuals with fantastical imagery. He is considered one of the most influential filmmakers of the 20^th century. I would absolutely agree, considering his influence over my own cinematic work. Over his career, he won five Academy Awards (four Best Foreign Language Film, one Lifetime Achievement Award).  This was the most Best Foreign Language Film Oscars anyone has ever won (oscars.org).

Fellini was born on January 20^th 1920 from Italian descent in the small town of Rimini (that would partially inspire one of his masterpieces, Amarcord). He left Rimini at the age of eighteen to move to Rome.

Fellini discovered in 1926 the world of Grand Guignol, the circus with Pierino the Clown. This discovery would eventually create a motif of the circus that would carry throughout his cinematic career.

While in Rome, Fellini achieved success writing regularly under his column for Marc’ Aurelio titled: Will You Listen to What I Have to Say? The magazine gave him consistent employment allowing him to meet future collaborates and get his foot into the movie industry.

In 1950 Fellini co-produced and co-directed with Alberto Lattuada Variety Lights, his first feature film. The film features Fellini’s wife, Giulietta Masina and Lattuada’s wife, Carla del Poggio as characters set in a world of travelling performers (the origins of the circus motif). Variety Lights received poor reviews and limited distribution, resulting in failure for everyone involved with the project (leaving Fellini and Lattuada in debt for over a decade).

Regardless of such an early disastrous fate, Fellini would go on to write and direct over twenty-five films, but I am going to discuss his three most important films (three of the four films that he won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film).

My second favorite Fellini film, La Strada, won him his second Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. La Strada is Fellini’s last neo-realist movie that hints toward his future embarkation into fantastical narrative, characters, and filmmaking techniques. The film portrays the journey of a brutish strongman, Zampano and a naïve young woman, Gelsomina, whom he buys from her mother and takes with him on the road; their encounters with his old rival, the Fool, cause their destruction. The film is highly symbolic. The metaphor of the road is the journey of life that would lead to their entire end. Each main character is an archetype of humanity: the Fool is always pushing buttons, even if it may lead to his own demise; Zampano who loves but does not know how to express it, therefore it manifests into brutality; and Gelsomina, who is absolutely innocent to the point of not being able to help herself. La Strada has become "one of the most influential films ever made," according to the American Film Institute (afi.com). It was placed fourth in the 1992 British Film Institute directors' list of cinema's top 10 films (http://old.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/). In my opinion, La Strada has one of the most powerful endings, and it truly shook me emotionally, of Zampano on the beach coming to terms with his brutality that destroyed the one thing that would ever love him.

Amarcord is my third favorite Fellini film, which won him his fourth and last Best Foreign Language film Oscar. Over a period of six months between January and June 1973, Fellini shot the movie. The film depicts the adolescent, Titta, and his friends, working out their sexual frustrations against the religious and Fascist backdrop of a provincial town in Italy during the 1930s. Circular in form, Amarcord avoids plot and linear narrative. I was mesmerized by its structure and style (characters consistently breaking of the fourth wall), which is presented as if the audience is a guest visiting and exploring the memories and adventures of this small Italian town. It is a mosaic, a collage of the imaginational memory of Fellini’s childhood.

And finally, 8 ½, my favorite film of all time, and it is considered Fellini’s magnum opus. It won him his third Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. To epitomize the moving image and the study of film, Fellini’s 8 ½ triumphed to let me see what can be done with a camera and lighting. Fellini’s flamboyant, magical tracking shots were elaborately blocked, allowing reality and fantasy to move interchangeably within the frame of the camera, creating a new cinematic dialogue and artistic perspective of viewing life. It is a narrative of the creative process brought to reality. The story is of Guido, a filmmaker, who is suffering with the creative process of producing his new film. As he struggles to make his film, the movie blurs reality with a series of flashbacks and dreams of Guido’s life and what he wants to portray within his film. 8 ½, honored as one of the greatest films of created and the best movie ever made about filmmaking, reflects to me the process and struggle that all artists have to endure and how we confront the issue. Guido’s struggle to create art is universal. Fellini understood his medium and was a master of it. Reviewing 8 ½, Roger Ebert states, “The printed word is ideal for ideas; film is made for images, and images are best when they are free to evoke many associations and are not linked to narrowly-defined purposes.” Fellini’s unique style and mastering of his medium allowed him to create the unimaginable that I long to create. Fellini’s 8½ inspired among others: Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore, Truffaut’s Day for Night, and Fosse’s All That Jazz.

Fellini in my eyes is the ultimate auteur director internationally and my favorite. His personal and highly idiosyncratic visions of society are a unique combination of memory, dreams, fantasy and desire. A film is now coined “Fellinian” or “Felliniesque” if it resembles Fellini’s iconic extravagant, flamboyant cinematic style. He has created a new cinematic language for filmmakers to go forward with. Before any film project I create, I always watch a Fellini picture.

Film History Student Final Paper #2 - Billy Wilder

I am fortunate to teach Film/Video Production History in the Motion Picture/TV Department at the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. At the end of each semester, the students (who range from ages 18 - 21, usually) are required to write a paper about an auteur filmmaker of their choice. They are to provide an overview of the filmmaker's career and identify specific stylistic and/or thematic traits in his/her work that are "signatures," i.e. the things that make the filmmaker an auteur. I ask the students to write the paper in an informal, conversational tone, as if they are telling a story to a young person who knows nothing about the subject.  

I have picked three papers out of the bunch that I feel are worthy to be published here on my blog.

Second Paper:  BILLY WILDER, written by DIANA PETERS

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Billy Wilder: An Auteur Filmmaker

Billy Wilder is among the greatest filmmakers of all time. He isn’t always recognized for the great contributions he made to cinema as a whole. He lacked the recognizability and distinctness that directors such as Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles had, and never quite became a face of pop culture like they did.  The man himself once said, “The best director is the one you don't see.” It’s unfortunate that Billy Wilder isn’t exactly a household name considering the films that he made, his most popular being Some Like it Hot, Sunset Boulevard, Double Indemnity, and The Apartment, just to name a few. Billy Wilder is definitely remembered as an auteur filmmaker. Many of his films reflect similar ideas, themes, and traits. Few directors were as dedicated to their craft. Every film of his is just that—his. Wilder was not just a director, but also a writer. He wrote/co-wrote many of his films. He also wrote screenplays for films he didn’t direct. Wilder considered himself more of a writer than a director throughout his life. He has 78 writing credits on IMDB, and 27 directing credits. His headstone even says, “I’m a writer, but then, nobody’s perfect.” Billy Wilder was an auteur who should be celebrated for his work, which has made a big impact on cinema.

“Wilder is often called a cynic by movie critics because his protagonists are all antiheroes - men or women with grave character flaws. While he never hit his audience over the head with moralizing, his movies are profoundly moral nonetheless” (Mason, M.S.  Christian Science Monitor. January 30th, 1998.) Billy Wilder’s cynicism can be traced back to his days living in Europe. He was born with the name Samuel Wilder, on June 22, 1906  in Austria-Hungary, and his family later moved to Vienna. Being Jewish, he made the decision to leave Germany and move to Paris when Hitler had risen to power. Until recently, it was believed that his mother, stepfather (his biological father died young), and grandmother had died at Auschwitz. Regrettably, what really happened was not any better at all. They had all been killed at concentration camps, except for his grandmother, who was murdered in a ghetto. Billy Wilder was so disturbed by concentration camps and what the Nazis had done that he made a short documentary called Todesmuehlen or Death Camps, to expose these atrocities many people in the U.S. didn’t even realize were happening. It’s amazing that Wilder wasn’t more cynical. It’s also amazing that he not only made comedies, but some of the greatest and most influential comedies of all time. But he could switch between being dark and cynical to wickedly funny. Not many writers or directors are capable of that. He was perceived as a very cynical man though, regardless of his comedic capabilities.

Wilder was indeed defined by his cynicism. No film demonstrates that better than Ace in the Hole. From 1951, Ace in the Hole is the story of a ruthless journalist who pursues a story about a man who has fallen into a hole and can’t get out. It should also be noted that I’ve never heard a more clever film title in my life. Billy Wilder was extremely critical of the industry that he worked. This was very much a part of his ever-present cynicism. Sunset Boulevard, which is one of his most well known films, is a very cynical look at Hollywood. But cynicism isn’t enough to make a film great. I could name endless films that are dark and cynical and fail because they come from such a dark, unpleasant place. But Wilder’s films are still very enjoyable in spite of the heavily cynical tone so many of them take. He had a cynical outlook on life, and that was reflected in his films in an artful way. For example, there’s a scene in Ace in the Hole, in which the main protagonist/antihero Chuck Tatum, played by Kirk Douglas, has to deliver the news that Leo, the man stuck in the hole, has died. This is in the middle of a big “Leo-fest” as I’d call it, where people are mindlessly celebrating Leo as some kind of hero. There are many problems with this. Leo is not a hero, he is a man trapped in a hole. They are paying more attention to the fun party for Leo than to Leo himself. A terrible person by all accounts, Chuck becomes more dependable and kind to Leo than all of those people, to the point that they don’t even know he’s dead, they’re all too busy having a good time.

Billy Wilder was extremely ahead of his time. He was very critical of Hollywood. It’s incredible that what we see in Sunset Boulevard is still so relevant today. The idea that we take actors and actresses, make them larger-than-life celebrities who are admired by millions of people one moment, and then forget them the next. In fact, this happens even more now than it did in 1950, when Sunset Boulevard came out. I’d like to think that maybe it went over people’s heads a bit back then, maybe because Hollywood was relatively new and this was the first time it was happening in cinema history, where actors were being chucked to the side when they got old so a crop of new, talented, pretty people could replace them. I think it’s possible that people just weren’t truly aware of how being a film star works, unlike today. The film wasn’t unsuccessful then, but it was controversial. It was nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars, but lost to All About Eve. Sunset Boulevard probably should have won, because many regard it to be the better film, however I’m sure that the Academy was less than thrilled by this very obvious criticism of the Hollywood system.

Fedora was Billy Wilder’s tragically underrated, penultimate film. Fedora, is very much like Sunset Boulevard. Both films star William Holden. Both films are narrated by Holden in voiceovers. Both films are about a retired, reclusive, and aging actress. It doesn’t reach the level of greatness compared to that of Sunset Boulevard, though. Not even close. But it’s still worth checking out if you can find it. Why do I bring it up? Well, I’ve heard that Billy Wilder and William Holden wanted this movie to be made to prove that they were both still relevant. His previous film, The Front Page, was underwhelming and unmemorable, and I think he lost some credibility because of it. But Fedora is never given enough credit; it is his most interesting movie from his later career. It’s more interesting than The Front Page or The Fortune Cookie (I cannot personally vouch for Avanti! or Buddy Buddy as I have not seen them). But Fedora is very, very...weird. It’s just a downright weird movie. It sometimes doesn’t feel like a Billy Wilder movie. It feels like a relatively low-budget European film from the late 1970s because, at its core, that’s what it is. Sure, Wilder’s sharp and witty dialogue comes through. And Wilder is excellent at directing actors, so unsurprisingly, the performances are excellent. A review from The Passionate Movie Goer’s blog sums it up well, “Fedora is an atmospheric, chilly affair, not quite as companionable as Sunset Blvd., and while Wilder opted for color cinematography (courtesy of Gerry Fisher's painterly hues) rather than black-&-white, he conjures up dreamy shadow imagery that efficiently distills his film's disturbing themes. (A French-German co-production, Fedora is essentially the European sibling of Sunset Blvd.)” (Joe Baltake, review of Fedora. February 15th, 2012.) The film is not bad at all and it wasn’t critically panned either. It was just...kind of a weird movie. The kind of weird movie that didn’t have much of an audience. Which is why I find it so charming. But the thing about Fedora that links back to what I was saying before is that I think, even in 1978 when Fedora came out, it went over a lot of people’s heads. Just as Sunset Boulevard went over people’s heads in 1950. Maybe the reason that it wasn’t loved was because it was just so darn cynical. It’s nowhere near as cynical as Sunset Boulevard, but  in 1978 people wanted to go to the theater to see Grease and Superman. People didn’t want to see a mystery film about a disturbed, reclusive actress, or a film about why the film industry is problematic. This film was a pretty big risk for Billy Wilder. He hadn’t made a picture in four years before Fedora and, to reiterate, his more recent films were met with underwhelming response, critically and commercially. I don’t know if he thought that Fedora would be successful, but I’d like to think he wanted to make this movie badly enough that he didn’t care. I’m sure that that isn’t true, because it was reported that he was very disappointed by the lack of interest among film distributors; he was also subsequently disappointed in the film’s limited run in theaters. But this was the film he wanted to make, and he made it, like a true auteur; not existing to make films just to please the masses.

Billy Wilder was also excellent at blending genres before that had even become common. He wasn’t the first one to do this, of course, but he started doing this early on and, in my opinion, really perfected it. Very few of his films can be easily defined by a single genre. The Apartment is a great example of this. Is it a comedy? There are some very darkly comedic moments, like when Fran, played by Shirley MacLaine, hears the cork pop and thinks it’s a gunshot. But overall, I think it’s too dark and unhappy to be a full-on comedy. Is it a drama? Kind of...but Jack Lemmon is cracking jokes throughout and maintaining a positive attitude despite his obvious disgust for what the people around him are doing. It could be called a romance, but it doesn’t get ‘romantic’ until the very end. It’s a satire, but unlike many satires, it doesn’t go over the top with its message and no one behaves too ridiculously. Many of his films are like this. Fedora is not just a drama; not just a thriller. It’s not a comedy for sure, but William Holden gets some funny moments. It’s everything and it’s nothing. Wilder’s movies are completely original pieces of cinema that are not defined simply by their genre. 

One of Billy Wilder’s greatest contributions to cinema was Double Indemnity, considered by many to be one of the greatest film noirs of all time. Like so many of Wilder’s films, the main character, Walter Neff, is an anti-hero. The film is an amazing achievement, not only for the genre of film noir, but film in general. Adapted from James M. Cain’s book of the same name, Double Indemnity follows an insurance salesman who finds himself committing an unthinkable crime. The film escalates brilliantly, and it’s a very clever psychological study of a man who makes a very bad decision, and comes to regret it. It’s not just the story of a crime, it’s the way these people are affected by this crime. Glenn Kenny wrote an entire article about the importance of Phyllis Dietrichson’s anklet, “And the anklet—the equipment of a woman, you know, that is married to this kind of man.’ It is curious that Wilder, reflecting on a film he made 53 years prior, was considering these in terms of the significance they had in the character's marriage to a man she eventually helped murder. An insight into how creative artists, the great ones, maintain ‘the whole equation’ in themselves. Because relative to the film's momentum, the person most affected by the anklet is Neff. It's brought up four times within seven minutes. Observing it, Neff says, ‘That's a honey of an anklet you're wearing, Mrs. Dietrichson. As I was saying, I'd hate to see the policies lapse.’ And after a bit more innocuous chit-chat, Neff's eye goes for the glint once more: ‘Wish you'd tell me what's engraved on that anklet.’”(Kenny, Glenn. Woman’s Equipment: Barbara Stanwyck's Anklet in "Double Indemnity". Rogerebert.com. October 14th, 2013).This is proof that Wilder had extreme attention to detail. He clearly paid attention to every aspect of his films, and even the little, seemingly insignificant things were meticulously planned, and had meaning to them. Wilder also called it his best film on a technical level. He had this to say about the film,  “I never heard that expression, film noir, when I made Double Indemnity... I just made pictures I would have liked to see. When I was lucky, it coincided with the taste of the audience. With Double Indemnity, I was lucky." And how great is it to make such a large contribution to such a highly regarded and important genre...without even knowing it.

It would be unfair of me to talk about Billy Wilder as an auteur without mentioning the contributions he made to comedy. His best comedies are, in my opinion, Some Like it Hot and One, Two, Three. Some Like it Hot starts out with two musicians that are witnesses to the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre and are on the run from the gangsters who committed the crime they had seen. It seems, at first, like it’s going to be a very dark gangster film or something of the sort. The scene where the massacre happens is serious and nothing is played for laughs. But as the men dress in drag and join a travelling women’s band, the film stays consistently funny. To just call it funny is a disservice to the brilliant writing of Billy Wilder and his co-writer, I.A.L. Diamond, as well as the comedic timing of Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, and Marilyn Monroe. It has been voted the #1 comedy according to the American Film Institute’s list “America’s Funniest Movies.” That is really saying something, as it is listed above Blazing Saddles, Duck Soup, The General, and City Lights. Some Like it Hot should be noted because with it Billy Wilder really pushed the boundaries of The Production Code. Many of his films pushed boundaries with overt sexual innuendo and raciness, but Some Like it Hot had men dressed in drag, which was unheard of at the time. It had sexually explicit dialogue, like the scene where Joe is trying to woo Sugar by suggesting that he’s impotent, to encourage her to have her way with him. And even a little bit of nudity: Marilyn Monroe’s breasts are in plain view...almost. She didn’t want to wear her dress and just wore the mesh part. So she was covered only by mesh and strategic lighting. I think that Billy Wilder enjoyed controversy, and enjoyed working slight risqué content into his films. One, Two, Three is another one of his great comedies. The controversy comes from the film taking place during the Cold War, before the construction of the Berlin Wall. Many jokes about the Soviets are made. Finland even banned the film, in hopes of not hurting their relations with the Soviet Union. The film has (again) a main character anti-hero, who cheats on his wife, struggles with his job and his boss, and constantly gets angry at everyone around him. The best comedic moments come at the end of the film, when Mac and his friends are transforming Otto into an upstanding aristocrat. The comedy is fast paced and begs for repeated viewings, and the satire remains interesting with every re-watch.

Billy Wilder had a plaque in his office that read “How would Ernst Lubitsch do it?” I can only hope that there are modern-day directors with a plaque that says “How would Billy Wilder do it?” My hope is that Billy Wilder will be remembered for his enormous contributions to film, as a form of art and entertainment. He deserves to be remembered for his witty and smart writing, as well as his brilliant style of directing. And maybe he is being remembered, after all, who was it that Michel Hazanavicius thanked in his acceptance speech at the 2012 Oscars for The Artist? Oh yes, “I want to thank Billy Wilder, I want to thank Billy Wilder and I want to thank Billy Wilder.” Maybe Michel Hazanavicius has one of those plaques.

Works Cited

Baltake, Joe. "Cinema Obscura: Billy Wilder's Fedora (1978)." Thepassionatemoviegoer.com. N.p., 15 Feb. 2012. Web. 09 Dec. 2013.

Kenny, Glenn. "A Woman's Equipment: Barbara Stanwyck's Anklet In "Double Indemnity"" All Content. Rogerebert.com, 14 Oct. 2013. Web. 10 Dec. 2013.

Mason, M.S. "Billy Wilder's Sophisticated Touch." Christiansciencemonitor. N.p., 30 Jan. 1998. Web. 
            09 Dec. 2013. 

Film History Student Final Paper #1 - Oscar Micheaux

I am fortunate to teach Film/Video Production History in the Motion Picture/TV Department at the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. At the end of each semester, the students (who range from ages 18 - 21, usually) are required to write a paper about an auteur filmmaker of their choice. They are to provide an overview of the filmmaker's career and identify specific stylistic and/or thematic traits in his/her work that are "signatures," i.e. the things that make the filmmaker an auteur. I ask the students to write the paper in an informal, conversational tone, as if they are telling a story to a young person who knows nothing about the subject.  

I have picked three papers out of the bunch that I feel are worthy to be published here on my blog.  I'll be presenting the other two in the coming days.

First up--OSCAR MICHEAUX, written by LAWRENCE DENHAM

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Oscar Micheaux: Auteur Filmmaker

Try to imagine a time when racism was okay to most people, when there were black and white water fountains and bathrooms, and when even movie theaters could be segregated. So, can you picture it? Probably not, and neither can I, honestly. It’s hard to imagine, but this stuff was a reality less than a hundred years ago in America. Isn’t that pretty crazy? Luckily for you and me today, we don’t have to deal with that kind of stuff like most people did back then. But men like Oscar Micheaux had to face those problems every day, for pretty much his entire life. And even though he faced all of those issues, he is known today as the first major African American filmmaker in history. Oscar was a director, screenwriter, and producer all wrapped into one dude. He’d definitely be a guy that I’d want to meet. So, are you interested in learning some cool stuff about Oscar Micheaux? I’m going to tell you about his life and career, his importance to the history of film, three of his movies, and why he’s considered an auteur. Are you more interested now? I hope so! So, let’s get started.

I mentioned earlier that Oscar Micheaux lived during a time when America was extremely racist and many places were segregated. Oscar was born on January 2, 1884 in Metropolis, Illinois. This was only about twenty years after the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation. Oscar’s parents were actually former slaves, which was pretty common at the time. Micheaux spent most of his time as a kid in Great Bend, Kansas, and then he moved to Chicago when he was seventeen because he needed a job. He found one there as a Pullman Porter, which is basically where you help passengers on trains. But by 1906, Oscar got bored with that job and decided to go West and buy some land in South Dakota. Oscar lived in South Dakota for eight years, and while he was there he wrote stories about his white neighbors. I guess they must have been pretty interesting people, because his stories eventually became his first novel, called, The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer. He published that book in 1913, but then there was a drought so he had to move to Sioux City, Iowa. In 1917 he rewrote his book and rereleased it as the novel, The Homesteader. (http://www.biography.com/people/oscar-micheaux-9407584)

Oscar’s new and improved novel was really popular, and an African American film company asked him if they could make it into a movie. But Oscar and the film company couldn’t agree to a deal, so Oscar decided to start his own company, which he called Micheaux Film and Book Company. He sold stock in the company to raise money to produce the movie on his own. When he finished the film, it was eight reels long.  It was a huge moment because Oscar Micheaux became the first African American to make a feature length film. So, The Homesteader premiered in Chicago in 1919, and it was a big hit. Oscar Micheaux’s second movie was called Within Our Gates, and it came out in 1920. That movie was a response to The Birth of a Nation by D.W. Griffith, which was the most popular film at that time and probably the most racist movie in history. Over the next thirty years, Oscar continued to make films. He wrote, produced, and directed over forty-five of them from 1919 to 1948, which was unheard of for African Americans at the time. In 1931, Oscar made history again when his movie, The Exile was the first full-length sound film by an African American. His last film, Betrayal in 1948 also made history because it was the first movie made by a black person to be shown in a white movie theater. A few years later, Oscar Micheaux died on March 25, 1951 in Charlotte, North Carolina. After he died, The Directors Guild of America awarded him the Golden Jubilee Special Directional Award in 1986. In 1987, he received a star on the Walk of Fame. (http://www.biography.com/people/oscar-micheaux-9407584)

If you’ve been following this essay, you now know why Oscar Micheaux is an important filmmaker in the history of film. As I mentioned he was the first black filmmaker to make a feature length film in 1919, the first black filmmaker to make a feature length sound film in 1931, and was the first black filmmaker to have his movie shown in a white theater in 1948! Oscar was part of a film movement called race films. These were motion pictures made by black people with an all black cast, made for black audiences. Most race films were made from the early 1920s to the 1950s. Race films were meant to challenge segregation and to address other social problems and stereotypes that black people faced back then. (http://www.biography.com/people/oscar-micheaux-9407584) (http://blogs.bgsu.edu/thfm2620group3/a-quick-overview-of-the-race-films-movement/beginnings-of-the-race-film-movement-from-blackface-to-black-cinema/)

Oscar Micheaux is considered an auteur filmmaker. He is an auteur because all of his movies feature a non-stereotyped black cast, made for a black audience, and challenged segregation, racism, racial violence, the education system, and poverty. His movies were meant to erase the popular racist stereotypes of black people back then. To explain how Oscar Micheaux is an auteur, I’m going to discuss three of his films, which are Within Our Gates, Murder in Harlem, and Body and Soul. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Micheaux#Filmography)

Within Our Gates came out in 1920. It was a response to the very racist The Birth of a Nation,” made by D.W. Griffith. Instead of the black people being evil and the bad guys as in Griffith’s movie, Oscar’s movie told his side of the story and portrayed black people as the good guys. His film took place in the present and was meant to show people the real problems that African Americans faced during that time, which included poverty, the Jim Crow laws, lack of education opportunities, and lynching. Oscar used a cast of real black people in this movie, unlike Griffith who used white people in black face in his. In all of Micheaux’s films, he wanted to show America that black people were just as intelligent and respectable as white people. This movie contains racial violence, too, because towards the end of the movie the main character Sylvia’s adoptive parents are lynched for a murder to which they have no connection. They are murdered just for the fact that they are black. The film contains struggles with poverty and the education system because the main character’s goal is to raise money to support African American students in the Deep South. These are examples of signature traits that Oscar Micheaux incorporated in his movies.

Second—Murder in Harlem, which came out in 1935.  This movie is basically about a black night watchman who finds a dead young woman in the basement of the chemical factory where he works. After he reports the dead woman to the police, he is falsely accused of the murder because he is black. But it turns out that a white man committed the murder. This movie is important to Micheaux’s career as an auteur because it contains one of his signature film traits, which is racism and violence. It is a classic example of a black person being punished for something that he didn’t do, which was a very common racist thing at that time. Like Within Our Gates, this film had black main characters that are very intelligent and are not racist stereotypes.

My last example is the movie Body and Soul, which came out in 1925. In a nutshell, this movie is about a shady preacher that steals money from his church congregation and from a young woman and her mother. The mother doesn’t realize that the preacher is bad and tries to arrange a marriage between him and her daughter. The daughter sees that the preacher is a bad guy and ends up exposing him. But before she gets the chance to expose him, she dies. The mom is sad, but then she realizes that she had dreamt the whole story all along. The daughter ends up marrying a good man. Pretty complex plot, right? As in the other two films, this movie contains traits that prove Oscar Micheaux is an auteur. The mother and daughter are victims of the poverty that black people faced during Oscar’s time. The movie features an all black cast, and the main characters, the mother and daughter, are non-stereotypical black people.

To me, Oscar Micheaux is probably the most important African American filmmaker in history. Just think about all of those milestones that he set, such as being the first black person to make a feature length film, or the first black filmmaker to have their film shown in a white theater. Those accomplishments can never be repeated! Not to mention that his movies are quite good and unique, in my opinion. In fact, since this paper is finished, why don’t you go and watch one of his movies right now? Who knows, it might inspire you to change society like Oscar Micheaux did.

Works Cited

Within Our Gates. Prod. Oscar Micheaux. Dir. Oscar Micheaux. By Oscar Micheaux.

Perf. Oscar Micheaux. Micheaux Film Co., Quality Amusement Corp., 1920.

Youtube.

Body and Soul. Dir. Oscar Micheaux. Micheaux Film Co., Quality Amusement Corp.,

1925. Youtube.

Murder in Harlem. Dir. Oscar Micheaux. Micheaux Film Co., Quality Amusement

Corp., 1935. Youtube.

"Oscar Micheaux." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 30 Nov. 2013. Web. 07 Dec.

2013.

"Mystery History Theatre." Mystery History Theatre RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 Dec. 2013.

"Oscar Micheaux Biography." Bio.com. A&E Networks Television, n.d. Web. 07 Dec.

2013. 

Review of Criterion's "Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion"

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