Jacqueline Stewart: Self
Quotes
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Jacqueline Stewart : Oscar Micheaux is the most important black filmmaker who ever lived. Period.
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Jacqueline Stewart : He really wanted to get his message out to the race as a whole. And, so, what better way than this new medium of cinema. Not totally new, but, new in the hands of black artists. Cinema has, I think he recognized ,the ability to mirror. So, when audiences would look at other black characters on the screen, which was rare at the time, that could give them a different kind of visual sense of what they could be. It's a medium that allows someone to reflect upon themselves, their own identities and their own possibilities.
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Jacqueline Stewart : 'The Birth of a Nation' features the coming together of the white north and the white south through romantic relationship. And Micheaux does the same thing with the black characters. A black woman of the south has a variety of suitors to choose from, but, her relationship with a doctor from the north, is one way that Micheaux is demonstrating the kind of *healing* of the black community across regional divides - and the creation of a black uplift marriage that's going to just disprove all of the things about black people that 'The Birth of a Nation' is suggesting. Speaking to the future of the race and that is really emphatic. It doesn't always make for the most, kind of, like, escapist viewing experience. Instead, its like he's holding up a kind of magnifying glass to American race relations and really making you look at things that you had not appreciated with the naked eye.
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Jacqueline Stewart : He felt that the ways in which he was being censored, these were not just affronts to his artistic vision, but, they were politically motivated. These were attempts to try to keep black people from really feeling and seeing the weight of the political messages that he was including in his films. And he was resisting that - over and over again. There were some cases in which he would take the seal that he got for another film and put it on a new film, so that it seemed like that one had passed the Censor Board, when, really it hadn't.
