Race Films & Black Female Filmmakers

The all-black film movement started in the silent era with the Lincoln Motion Picture company in Los Angeles in 1916, a black-owned and operated film corporation (Sampson 27). The most successful of all black-owned independent film production companies was the Micheaux Film and Book Corporation, later known as the Micheaux Film Corporation. This company was founded in 1918 and would continue producing films through the 1920s and 1930s (Sampson 42). Other companies followed, some in business for only a short time. The black films produced by these companies between 1910 and 1950 were a form of underground film, produced not for the mass audience but for the specialized black audience. Most of these films would be considered "C"-grade as Hollywood productions:

This general lack of quality can be traced directly to the lack of adequate fin

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omic phenomenon that produced a particular audience and need for films made by and for blacks rather than merely a means of conveying white-produced product to a black audience. Naturally, black-themed and black-produced films had a different sensibility and tended to address issues of interest to the audience. Oscar Micheaux made use of this system to produce films which did express a black sensibility and view of society. At times this would get him into some trouble as his films were seen as inflammatory. Gaines cites the case of the 1919 film Within Our Gates, a film opposed by representatives of both the black and white communities because of a perceived linkage between depictions in the film and acts of lynching. The lynching element in this film was actually a minor one, but it was featured in advertising and promotion as if it were much more central (Gaines 52). Gaines analyzes this particular film and finds that Micheaux uses cross-cutting between a lynching and an attempted rape in a way that says much about how African-American artists use melodramatic devices (Gaines 55). Gaines also finds that Micheaux's work is marked by cinematic devices that include unmarked transitions and temporal ambiguities, and the st
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Approximate Word count = 2778
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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