Sophistication under Construction: Oscar Micheaux’s Infamous Sound Films
What we witness as we experience his work is an evidence of the extreme effort required of maker and spectator alike at the pivotal point in space and time when a new tradition (one uses the phrase without hesitation) is sensed and known to be “under construction”: and, best of all, the extreme satisfaction consequent upon that effort in its most coherent moments.
Hollis Frampton, “Inclusions for Patrick Clancy,” in On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton
Oscar Micheaux (1884–1951) was and remains the most prolific and celebrated director of African American films during the era when they were called Race Movies. He made some forty independent feature films between 1919 and 1948, and though he was largely forgotten for several decades, recent interest in his work has been robust.1
Almost everyone has initial problems taking seriously much of Oscar Micheaux’s sound-era film work. An example of the problem from The Girl from Chicago (1932) is the second solo by Mary Austin’s sister (see figures 1a–1d).2 This scene is awkward, owing to amateurish acting, blocking, editing, sound mixing, and lighting, especially the wandering key light in this shot, which sometimes includes Norma, the younger spectator, in its light and sometimes does not (figures 1a–1c). This keylight radically realigns itself after a couple of edits in the same scene (figure 1d).
Such ineptitude is hard to recommend even to the most sympathetic film fan or race-movie supporter. However, there is a technically awkward scene of similar ineptitude from Ten Minutes to Live (also 1932) that almost anyone can appreciate, the two-and-a-half-minute taxi ride when Letha enters New York City for the first time (see figure 2). This sequence is sublime, comparing well with Expressionist classics and American avant-garde films of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. In fact, Ken Jacobs reputedly has stated that he could happily have incorporated not just this scene but the whole of Ten Minutes to Live as his own work.
Figures 1a–1d. The Girl from Chicago (Oscar Micheaux, US, 1932).
The Girl from Chicago (Oscar Micheaux, US, 1932).
But I want to stick with the more typical Micheaux scene. Soon after the solo illustrated above from The Girl from Chicago, another very similar solo occurs with similar problems (see figure 3). This scene is as amateurish in its handling of technical elements as the first solo mentioned above, and it doesn’t really work as normal cinema, nor does it transcend its technical problems like the taxi ride in Ten Minutes to Live. In addition to the wandering key light, the establishing shot is static and tableau-like, the eyeline matching seems off, the lighting setup alters between the tableaux and the close-ups, expressions on people’s faces are not appropriate to the progress of the action, and emphatic facial expressions repeat unaccountably and without ever being acknowledged by the other members of the group.
However, if this scene is taken as a set-piece production number, like Al Jolson’s solos in The Jazz Singer, then there is a kind of logic to some of these mistakes. Micheaux is mounting a secular version of a spiritual that might be titled “Shout, Sister, Shout!” The dialogue has already established that both the piano player and the vocalist, Wade Washington, are members of the local church choir. The film’s editing of this set-piece interpolates their religious song into a worldly social-uplift skit in which the Devil is represented by a peonage boss’s informer, and the sister’s shout is represented by Norma’s wide-open mouth. The shooting and editing of the scene accomplish this transposition perfectly well. I say perfectly in the sense that the elements that Micheaux cares about—the conjuring of a Negro spiritual, the lines of the song about the devil rising up, the close-up of a snitch rising up in the window, the particular lines of the song about a sister shouting, and the shocking foregrounding of Norma seeming to shout—these several elements all work to make the spiritual-to-secular transposition Micheaux wants to construct.
Figure 2. Ten Minutes to Live (Oscar Micheaux, US, 1932).
To fully appreciate this scene, one probably has to accept Micheaux’s style as analogous to folk art or to self-taught audio-visual art such as the work of Jack Smith, Barbara Rubin, Andy Warhol, and early Robert Frank and Ken Jacobs. Micheaux’s work in general has many of the qualities of those films, qualities such as obsession, technical insouciance, and fierce personal integrity. But what really interests me is a particular quality we can call “performativity,” as described recently by Jonathan Rosenbaum: “What I mean [by performative works] isn’t the performances of the actors, but the performances of these films as films—what might be described . . . as the way they speak and look at us, insisting on their own being, and activity.”3 This kind of performative filmmaking allows the basic elements of cinema to disamalgamate, to separate out from the continuity mix.
Figure 3. The Girl from Chicago.
Recall the first scene that we found awkward and indefensible, the most risible element of which was perhaps the wandering key light. The lighting element of that scene can be perceived as a separate element calling attention to itself as an element, no doubt unintentionally. Compare that to a scene from Yvonne Rainer’s first film, Lives of Performers (1972), in which the key light becomes a separate filmic element (see figure 4). In the last five frames, the key light and camera move, not the dancer, and thus the key light becomes the featured performer. This device of extracting an intrinsic filmic element to perform is not only consistent with Rainer’s project of taking apart and reconstructing cinema for her own purposes, but it is a central trait of the avant-garde, emblematic of the cultural politics of reflexivity.
Spinoza wrote in 1662, “If a complex object be divided by thought into a number of simple component parts, and if each part be regarded separately, all confusion will disappear.” Many of the discourses of self-reflexive modernism take that charmingly simple remark as their marching orders. Even Hollywood refers to the separate components of production value as elements with a capital E. In the opening scene of Tout va bien, Godard seems to answer Spinoza’s call by breaking down each of the contributing Hollywood elements of production into a dollar value and a check. That’s one way of doing deconstruction, and Godard continues it well beyond the check writing by presenting and explaining each of the component elements, such as stars, characters, sets, locations, script, and stock situations. Godard precipitates out the separate elements that make up the heady mixture we call production value and spectacle.
Figure 4. Lives of Performers (Yvonne Rainer, US, 1972).
Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet are just as elemental as Rainer and Godard. When Straub/Huillet present a shot, the effect is partly dependent on a radical simplification and isolation of that shot as a shot; their shots tend to be held long enough to be appreciated for the decisions that went into them. Everything technically inessential is pared away. Unessential camera movement, props, lighting, and blocking are either absent or radically simplified. Acting is rehearsed endlessly so that all the psychology and professional method are sublimated out of the delivery. The basic elements of cinema are somehow refined by this process, but that’s another story; my point here is that those elements stand forth as elements that have been so thoughtfully presented that the viewer participates in the underlying thinking.
Casting is another case in point. Straub/Huillet’s isolation and articulation of casting decisions, and their perverse deployment of amateurism, are famous. Barton Byg points out in Landscapes of Resistance that—in Straub/Huillet’s film version of Brecht’s revision of Holderlin’s translation of Sophocles’ Antigone—“Antigone is played by a young and inexperienced act[ress]” and Creon’s role is taken by a “picturebook version of a hammy, provincial actor [see figures 5 and 6]. Werner Rehm’s prowess in pulling out the rhetorical stops [in playing Creon] corresponds to ‘the professionalism of power,’” in the Straub/Huillet casting decision.4
Figure 5. Antigone (Jean-Marie Straub/Danièle Huillet, DE/FR, 1992).
Charles Musser has beautifully analyzed very analogous casting sophistication in Micheaux’s handling of Paul Robeson in Body and Soul.5 And the kind of casting decisions of Straub/Huillet that are discernable in reception are probably even more discernable in Micheaux’s films. However, the aspect of Straub/Huillet’s deployment of actors that interests me here in relation to Micheaux is the related element of diction. Barton Byg observes that the “separate ‘semantic codes’ [in Holderlin’s separation of the worlds of Antigone and Creon] become [also] a difference in diction, with Creon preening himself with the elaborate rhetoric of power, and Antigone confronting him with harsh, almost vulgar phrases [222].” A further and more entertaining example of such stylization of diction is the last scene of Straub/Huillet’s Sicilia!, where the knife grinder theatrically declaims his divorcement from capitalist relations and celebrates his return to the human race (see figure 7). Compare the stylized, sprung diction of this scene with a typical scene of Micheaux’s from God’s Step Children that could have been mounted by the Straubs, in which the white school superintendent and his secretary speak in utterly formal, classical declamation, arranged stiffly in stage-front address (see figure 8).
Figure 6. Antigone.
Figure 7. Sicilia! ( Jean-Marie Straub/Danièle Huillet, IT/FR/CH, 1999).
In Straub/Huillet’s, as in Godard’s, Warhol’s, Rainer’s, and other deconstructionists’ films, the sprung nature of the declamatory diction is clearly contributory to the revelatory effect. In reception we can feel that effect, and in theory we can explain it as deconstructionist.
Barton Byg, writing about Straub/Huillet, refers to their film Empedocles as what Raphael Bassen calls a creative documentary of the performance.6 Micheaux’s films are equally documentaries of the performances, as well as creative documentaries of the workings of the films’ other filmic elements.
Why should such a documentary be valued? According to Byg, Straub/ Huillet “are continuing the Brechtian tradition[;] . . . accents and foreigners’ difficulty in speaking a language actually reveal a truthfulness not available in ‘normal’ speech. . . . By alienating the German language, Straub/Huillet are both ‘wresting it from control of the bourgeoisie,’ and regaining a new access to it for contemporary Germans.”7
Figure 8. God’s Step Children (Oscar Micheaux, US, 1938).
But, you may say, Micheaux was not trying to wrest language and cinema from the control of the bourgeoisie; he was a wannabe bourgeois himself. That’s true, but this wannabe bourgeois was never a gonnabe American mainstream bourgeois. His response to his outsider situation was very much a wresting of language and cinema from the control of that bourgeoisie.
Nevertheless, there is a difference between Micheaux’s wresting of control and Straub/Huillet’s. Micheaux is not trying to create a fragmentary discursive style, nor he is not trying to make films in which the elements separate themselves out from the narrative experience, while Straub/Huillet are definitely trying to do that. They have a different relationship to mainstream and classical cinema. Both Micheaux and the Straubs find mainstream cinema oppressive, but for different reasons: Straub/Huillet because it is too habitual and habituated, Micheaux because its habits are exclusionist.
Micheaux’s films and Straub/Huillet’s films are both examples of Gilles Deleuze’s rhizomes, but Straub/Huillet’s rhizomes can be called deconstructionist and Micheaux’s cannot. If we characterize Rainer, Godard, Straub/ Huillet, and Warhol as Sophistication Under De-construction, we might characterize Micheaux as Sophistication Under Construction. Deconstruction and under-construction films display similar characteristics.
For one thing, both deconstruction and under-construction favor parable-like narratives of their constructive intentions. One of Straub/Huillet’s most charming and emblematic films, En Rachachant, portrays a child who refuses to go to school and proposes to teach himself through a method he calls en rachachant, a neologism that suggests something like “self-racheting,” anticipating the philosophy of Jacques Rancier’s Ignorant Schoolmaster. Similarly, Yvonne Rainer’s first film, Lives of Performers, documents the construction of one of Rainer’s seminal Judson Church dance works at the same time that it deconstructs documentary. And again, in Godard’s Tout va bien, the deconstructive bank checks are written in order to construct the very movie called Tout va bien. In all these films, and in many others, deconstruction tells stories of construction.
A similar concern for the scene of construction comes out in Micheaux’s stories. They are all uplift stories, stories of a social class under construction, stories such as that of the successful but unsophisticated striving young farmer who practices his wooing of an exclusionistic city in God’s Step Children (see figure 9). The scene portrays not a scene of his polished proposal, but his awkward practicing to get it right.
Like this farmer’s marriage proposal, Micheaux’s whole sound-film career is a construction site, the unnerving messiness of which is, presumably, the reason for the general climate of critical disdain for Micheaux’s sound-era accomplishment. Micheaux’s construction labor during this era often intrudes quite literally, as in the beautiful taxi ride in Ten Minutes to Live where one can sense the hand of the sound mixer as the haunting music stops to make sonic room for the disturbing car horns. You can often see and hear Micheaux himself in the very act of constructing sophistication by prompting actors with their lines, including his white film crew in the frame, and telling his cameraman when to cut, as in the scene in The Girl from Chicago when Alonzo and Norma kiss in their apartment and leave for the nightclub, at which point the sound man and his microphone boom appear on the right frameline (the figure in the white jacket on the right-hand frame line is not a character, but a member of Micheaux’s crew) and Micheaux mercifully says, “OK, cut” (figure 10).
Figure 9. God’s Step Children.
What we make of these indices of under-construction is a matter of reception. Barton Byg points out that Straub/Huillet’s “stylized manipulation of diction . . . functions simply to distance the hearer from both the meaning and the delivery, again so that the elements can be appreciated in their separation.” Similarly, we can say that Micheaux’s stylized manipulation of speech also, but unintentionally, functions to distance the hearer from both the meaning and delivery, resulting, also unintentionally, in the separation of the elements, whether that separation is appreciated or not. Speaking of appreciation, Byg goes on to note that “the hostility of the reception to this method . . . is quite telling.” This is where Byg says that “Straub/Huillet are ‘wresting [the German language] from the control of the bourgeoisie’ . . . and regaining a new access to it for contemporary Germans.” Byg contends that “the principles Straub/Huillet employ seem at least consistent with Holderlin’s position [which said that] ‘what is proper to oneself must [also] be learned as what is alien. Therefore the Greeks are indispensable to us [Germans].’”8
What Byg says about Straub/Huillet being indispensable to the Germans can be applied to the reception of Micheaux’s sound films: they are received with hostility, but are indispensable to the Americans. A polished, sophisticated Micheaux sound cinema would not have been able to perform these deconstructionistic, under-construction functions. The kinds of cinema that can deliver that sort of value must clearly show—not hide—how sophistication has been constructed or is being constructed before one’s eyes.
Figure 10. The Girl from Chicago.
Micheaux did not set out to deconstruct anything in the modernist, postmodernist, or Derridian sense, but he did intend to critique and revise mainstream cinema. He would certainly understand the idea that the deeply rooted tree of mainstream cinema had made him suffer too much. “Made to suffer too much” are Deleuze’s words, and Deleuze notes that as a result of this suffering, “[a] new rhizome may form in the heart of a tree, the hollow of a root, the crook of a branch.”9
Micheaux’s films are somewhere in there; not integral parts of the master-tree’s roots, trunk, branches, or leaves, but rhizomes in the heart, hollows, and crooks of that tree. In that sense, Micheaux’s under-construction sophistication resembles the avant-garde’s sophistication under de-construction.
J. Ronald Green is professor of film studies in the Department of History of Art at Ohio State University. His books include Straight Lick: The Cinema of Oscar Micheaux; his other publications cover media policy, documentary, avant-garde film, video, photography, installation, and digital arts. Grant support has included residence at Bellagio and at Fundación Valparaíso, Spain, and he has served in national and local professional leadership positions. He has just finished two books on the effect of money on film integrity and is working on articles on the film loop.
Notes
1. See Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence, Writing Himself into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films, and His Audiences (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000); Pearl Bowser, Jane Gaines, and Charles Musser, Oscar Micheaux and His Circle: African-American Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); Jane Gaines, Fire and Desire: Mixed Race Movies in the Silent Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); J. Ronald Green, Straight Lick: The Cinema of Oscar Micheaux (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); and J. Ronald Green, With a Crooked Stick: The Films of Oscar Micheaux (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).
2. This essay is dedicated to Danièle Huillet, and also to Jane Gaines, whose ambition for her colleagues and for her field is like Abraham Lincoln’s—a little engine that knows no rest.
3. Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Global Discoveries on DVD,” Cinema Scope 37 (Winter 2009): 71.
4. Barton Byg, Landscapes of Resistance: The German Films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 222.
5. Charles Musser, “To Redream the Dreams of White Playwrights: Reappropriation and Resistance in Oscar Micheaux’s Body and Soul,” in Bowser, Gaines, and Musser, Oscar Micheaux and His Circle.
6. Byg, Landscapes of Resistance, 201.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); originally published as Mille Plateaux (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1980), 15.