In recent years, both blacks and women have had to fight to become recognized in the film industry and to achieve any form of power. There are now a handful of black film directors, and a few women directors as well. In the silent era, though, when the economics of filmmaking were quite different, there were a number of women in the director's chair, many forgotten today, just as there were many black directors not in mainstream Hollywood filmmaking but in the all-black film movement. A number of these black directors were in fact women as well, and they constituted an early challenge both to white and male dominance of filmmaking.
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 finances and experience of these early producers, most of whom had to start from scratch and learn all aspects of film production and distribution. In addition, they had no existing reservoir of experienced film actors and movie technicians to draw upon (Sampson 82).
The technical quality of these films started to show improvement in the 1930s and 1940s, and black audiences by then were becoming acquainted with the various black screen personalities. The fi...