- [first lines]
- Gian Luca Farinelli: Write often in the history of cinema, a few isolated voices have sprung. They come to resonate with us and turn out prophetic only after decades. This the case with Oscar Micheaux.
- Kwame Kwei-Armah: Oscar Micheaux means you can do it. No matter what your environment, no matter what your time, *you* can simply do it.
- Amma Asante: He means groundbreaking. He means freedom and possibilities. The possibility for me to exist.
- Nicole London: He took his farming experience. his experiences as a Pullman Porter, and he kind of translated that onto the written page. Then, he kind of took the means to kind of self publish, as well, self publish, self distribute these books.
- Patrick McGilligan: Then, he goes all these neighbors, who's he's helped, he goes to the local bankers, and he'd say, "You give me a little money, you sign this, I sell some books, I give you some money back." They all invest in his life story! He turns his first book into what we guess is some kind of bestseller.
- Kevin Willmott: Micheaux is really unique in that sense. I mean, he wasn't afraid to be the only black person in Gregory, South Dakota. He wasn't afraid of that; which, a lot of black folks, at that time, would have been very frightened about that. I mean, this is a time of lynching - where black folks are being lynched all over the country. Black life is not valued very high.
- Michele Prettyman: Land figures extremely prominently in his imagination; but, in the life of black people of the time. Because, many in the South were promised their '40 acres and a mule' and virtually no one gets that. Micheaux, again, saw something, I think different with that. He was sort of running through some of the political theory and some of the ideology of the time. So, I think land is symbolically important; but, to him it was - it embodied something more.
- Richard Peña: I think he was someone who looked forward. And, you know, in many ways, the key experience for Micheaux, I believe, was when he worked as a Pullman Porter on the American railroads. Even though they were waiters and sort of cabin people, people who made up rooms, they did, in a sense, mingle with very high class white people and talk to them and get to know them and, I think, Micheaux in that experience said, "If these people can live like this, I can live like this and African Americans can live like this."
- Michele Prettyman: Its no surprise to me that someone like Micheaux would, like someone like Malcolm X, their early life, their formative years, be shaped by some degree of working on the train, working on a railroads. That's a defining, sort of, modernist impulse. And so, Micheaux is a part of that. He is a part of this ebb and flow culture and ideas and imagination that the train really embodies.
- Patrick McGilligan: He met people. He talked to them. He got books from them. He learned about society, about politics, about entertainment in different cities. It really him a worldly man - much more than a lot of people who spent their lives entirely in the midwest.
- Patrick McGilligan: He had tremendous American spirt of: start over again, let's do it! He preaches idealism and purity and sometimes he's a little tricky over here getting things done any way he can.
- 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.
- Kevin Willmott: One of the things I've always loved about Micheaux was that independent spirit. That thing of not letting anything stop him from being his artistic self. He gets a little small crew and drives out to Gregory, South Dakota to shoot a movie. They've got the cameras in the back seat, and you got to remember too, there's no film school, no one can teach you how to do this. I mean, you've got to figure this out - pretty much on your own. And I think all of that comes from that experience in South Dakota. You've got to go out in the middle of nowhere, you got to plant your seed, you got to grow the crop, and then you got to harvest it and then you got to take it to market. I mean, he does all of that - with film.
- 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.
- Nicole London: 'Within Our Gates' was a film that kind of tried to celebrate black Americans - especially the black middle class. That, I think, really kind of turned the narrative of 'The Birth of a Nation' on its head.
- Amma Asante: The idea that we could be good, bad, mad, angry, we could be all kinds of things. Its a direct response to the framing of African Americans in 'The Birth of a Nation'. Its a direct answer which is: that's not who we are, this is who we are.
- Kevin Willmott: In Micheaux's films, they're not documentary footage; but, they're documentary elements. These are things that are happening in society and to the black community. And he takes those things and he weaves them within the story. 'Within Our Gates' is a kind of example of that.
- Kevin Willmott: 'Birth of a Nation' makes lynching of black folks a positive thing.
- [referring to 'Within Our Gates']
- Kevin Willmott: And the fact that Micheaux takes those kind of counter images, that he constructs himself, and targets them directly back at 'Birth of Nation' is a really, really powerful thing at the time. When they show the mob attack the young boy and they hang his parents, those kind of images, you know, you got to understand, those were very shocking at that time.
- Amma Asante: To me, a movie doesn't become a movie until it meets an audience. And that's something that Oscar Micheaux knew and understood. He was making films about subjects and issues that mattered to black people and that mattered, full stop.
- 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.
- Patrick McGilligan: He took what he could borrow from things that he liked. So, you see scenes in 'Body and Soul' that are very German expressionist, very, very striking, especially when he's doing scenes with nature and windstorms, which he loved - wind. So, he was very sophisticated, sometimes in the lighting and in the composition.
- Kevin Willmott: Hollywood, for the most part, is not making, not telling our story. They're not making black films. And so, Micheaux has kind of the corner on the market. in that sense. He uses that to his advantage. So, it was kind of the best of times and the worst of times.
- Patrick McGilligan: He was showing history from the African American point of view and his films are very powerful and modern, in terms of their ideas, in terms of their style.
- Kevin Willmott: Oscar Micheaux is the real Superman; because, he didn't allow kryptonite to stop him - he didn't allow anything to stop him- and they threw everything they had at him and he still was able to get the job done.
- Amma Asante: He also dealt with some controversial subject matters, like interracial marriage. But, specifically, I think, his treatment of women is really interesting. He was telling stories in a way that we should. We should give women characters, obviously, dimension. We need to give black characters dimension. And we should offer them complexity. You know, that's one of the things I'm always really grateful to him for.
- Gian Luca Farinelli: The greatness of Micheaux's films lies in their uniqueness and in their courage to tell an inconvenient truth during dangerous times. These stories don't just appeal to a niche audience anymore, they cross the 20th century and reach us - a global audience - that finally realizes the atrocity of racism.
- Amma Asante: I often have an issue with the phrase, you know: one is ahead of their times. I think, Oscar Micheaux was right where he needed to be in terms of the way he told his stories. Moreover, it really is a more a society that was behind the times.
- Kevin Willmott: Interracial relationship was an important issue for Micheaux, as it is still today; because, it's kind of that final barrier, in many ways, you know. When interracial relationships are when people have to, in a sense, accept someone of another race, in their family. The idea, I think, Micheaux had is if you can break that barrier down in some ways, everything racially moves forward.
- Haskell Wexler: The first time I saw Oscar Micheaux, I was in high school. I was struck by his direct attitude and why was the attitude important? Because the attitude is contrary to the stereotype.
- Morgan Freeman: He was determined and quite successful. You can make it if you try. If you think Oscar Micheaux, you think: put your head down and go forward, you'll get it done. I wonder how many know him?
- [last lines]
- Chuck D: In all fairness, you have to fight for history. You just can't say history is gonna happen. You got to fight for it and fight for the memory. Cause past is past, no matter what. So, you gotta fight for the remembrance of the past.
- John Singleton: The negro people at the time, to see one's self or a vision of one's self that is moving and animated and giving off life, you know what I mean, was a phenomena.