What Ice Cube Needs to Know

Independent filmmaking didn't start with the Sundance Film Festival. Black independents can be traced back to the silent-era films of Oscar Micheaux and the "race films" of Spencer Williams in the mid-1940s. These facts are introduced in Movies of Color: Black Southern Cinema (Wellspring), a newly released DVD that examines the history of black independent filmmaking. Bonus features on the DVD include two full-length Spencer Williams shorts The Blood of Jesus andGo Down, Death -- in all, an over two-hour package and a good resource of African American popular art and heritage.

The choices Oscar Micheaux faced during the silent era are no different from those that challenge contemporary black filmmakers Network and cable-TV documentaries on film tend toward such flashy topics as celebrity biographies or the American Film Institute's yearly nostalgia polls, and are meant to send viewers off to the nearest rental store. Movies of Color: Black Southern Cinema is more useful, providing an overview of a neglected aspect of American filmmaking. It's a less glamorous history than that associated with Hollywood extravagance and mainstream recognition, yet it is a central part of the development of film culture and black expression.

Director Tom Thurman organizes this study around talking-head commentaries by an assortment of film scholars. Rather than the usual suspects trotted out on PBS, here's a refreshing panel of faces and disciplines: Bishetta Merritt, John Cawelti, Charles Regester, Gregory A. Waller, Stan Campbell, Stanley Booth and Charles Pace. These black and white representatives of mostly Southern colleges impart a distinctly personal commitment to this obscure topic. They give Movies of Color its sense of discovery and an air of urgency. Pace, who identifies himself as a "visual anthropologist," indicates how important it is to know this relatively forgotten history, implying it is part of the struggle for black identity and self-respect. The essence of independent filmmaking is to be found in the self-definition that under-capitalized, non-mainstream forbearers provided for themselves and their audiences. Ice Cube and Will Smith need to know: these historical examples of regional filmmaking (and regional scholarship) are models for an original, valuable cinema culture.

The choices Oscar Micheaux faced during the silent era are no different from those that challenge contemporary black filmmakers and observing Micheaux's filmography demonstrates how differently he responded. Such films as Body and Soul, Birthright and Within Our Gates were made with the audience's political needs -- and its emotional appetite -- foremost in Micheaux's consciousness. That he was more than a commercially aware filmmaker is what makes his movies matter nearly a hundred years later. Movies of Color relates the history of Within Our Gates to the rise of black social and film consciousness following the impact of D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation. Charlene Regester clarifies Griffith's aesthetic innovations from his backward, racist politics. This historical paradox - crucial to understanding American film culture -- has rarely been stated so incisively. Thurman helps by juxtaposing images from the Micheaux and Griffith films (side by side in the same frame) to point out the different perspectives. This not only indicates contrasting film styles, but also vividly illustrates the opposing ideologies.

Although Micheaux was from the Midwest, he pursued the interests of Southern blacks. His movies were informed by the social perspectives that developed in the black American south and then spread northward during the Great Migration. In Within Our Gates, Micheaux's story focuses on the Southern practice of lynching (here called "a symbol that the white power structure used to control black behavior"). Pace cites the film's "representation of the major terror, major horror, major reality of black life in the South." Black independent filmmaking of this sort eschewed escapism. It proved that more substantive forms of drama and entertainment were possible.