Citation:

Regester, Charlene. "The Misreading and Rereading of African American Filmmaker Oscar Micheaux: A Critical Review of Micheaux Scholarship" Film History 7.4 (1995): 426-449.

Content and Relevance of Work:

In this article, author and editor Charlene Regester defends Micheaux's intentions for making such controversial films, implying that the public misreads and misinterprets his work. Regester counters quotes from other Micheaux scholars, such as Gary Null and Donald Bogle, to argue her opinion that Micheaux presented valuable lessons to the Black community in each of his films. The article advises the re-examination of Micheaux's films. This text investigates how the critical profile of Micheaux has been constructed by researchers and scholars, how this profile has changed overtime (each decade from before the seventies to the nineties), and how it continues to evolve. Although many Micheaux scholars believe his films lacked ethnic truth and only reflected the outlooks of the black bourgeoisie, Regester claims Micheaux felt that whites and blacks were on an equal level: just as affluent, educated, cultured, and well-mannered. Lastly, Regester confronts the difficulty of studying African American filmmakers by the same standards as those used for critiquing white American filmmakers without taking into consideration the unique obstacles that complicated the African American filmmaking efforts.

According to Regester, Micheaux ignored the supposed burden of representing the blacks in only a favorable light because if his desire to better the African American community. Cripps says, in his quote within the article, this need to accurately depict black life is an exposé of social conditions relevant only to "Negro circles," and that Rev. Jenkins is an allegorical black figure who symbolizes the overall struggle of blacks: whether to fill the role of prim bourgeois, and risk losing black culture, or to become a criminal and hustler. Regester states, though, that through Micheaux's description of this rare side of black life to the general public, audiences (both black and white) found similarities to one another. Micheaux's focus on the dichotomy of good and evil pertains to a struggle of all mankind, not simply that of the black race. This particular aspect of Body and Soul that Regester identifies will be at the center of my essay.

Citation:

Regester, Charlene. "The Misreading and Rereading of African American Filmmaker Oscar Micheaux: A Critical Review of Micheaux Scholarship" Film History 7.4 (1995): 426-449.

In this article, author and editor Charlene Regester defends Micheaux's intentions for making such controversial films, implying that the public misreads and misinterprets his work. Regester counters quotes from other Micheaux scholars, such as Gary Null and Donald Bogle, to argue her opinion that Micheaux presented valuable lessons to the Black community in each of his films. The article advises the re-examination of Micheaux's films. This text investigates how the critical profile of Micheaux has been constructed by researchers and scholars, how this profile has changed overtime (each decade from before the seventies to the nineties), and how it continues to evolve. Although many Micheaux scholars believe his films lacked ethnic truth and only reflected the outlooks of the black bourgeoisie, Regester claims Micheaux felt that whites and blacks were on an equal level: just as affluent, educated, cultured, and well-mannered. Lastly, Regester confronts the difficulty of studying African American filmmakers by the same standards as those used for critiquing white American filmmakers without taking into consideration the unique obstacles that complicated the African American filmmaking efforts.

According to Regester, Micheaux ignored the supposed burden of representing the blacks in only a favorable light because if his desire to better the African American community. Cripps says, in his quote within the article, this need to accurately depict black life is an exposé of social conditions relevant only to "Negro circles," and that Rev. Jenkins is an allegorical black figure who symbolizes the overall struggle of blacks: whether to fill the role of prim bourgeois, and risk losing black culture, or to become a criminal and hustler. Regester states, though, that through Micheaux's description of this rare side of black life to the general public, audiences (both black and white) found similarities to one another. Micheaux's focus on the dichotomy of good and evil pertains to a struggle of all mankind, not simply that of the black race. This particular aspect of Body and Soul that Regester identifies will be at the center of my essay.

Citation:

Regester, Charlene. "The Misreading and Rereading of African American Filmmaker Oscar Micheaux: A Critical Review of Micheaux Scholarship" Film History 7.4 (1995): 426-449.

Content and Relevance of Work:

In her article titled "The Misreading and Rereading of African American Filmmaker Oscar Micheaux: A Critical Review of Micheaux Scholarship", Charlene Regester provides an account of the ways in which Micheaux's films and literary works have been interpreted over the years. She starts with the period before the 1970s and works through the decades of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. In the process she demonstrates an increasing awareness and appreciation for Micheaux's work by scholars and film historians. By the 1990s, she contends, Micheaux had correctly taken his place as a crucial part of black film history. Although it does mention the film Body and Soul briefly in some examples, this article does not expressly focus on the film. However, this article proves very useful to our investigation in that it provides varying interpretations by a range of scholars who were trying to analyze Micheaux's role as a filmmaker and his motives and goals within his films. By reading different scholars' views of Micheaux's films and their role as racial commentaries will provide us with good jumping-off-points for understand Micheaux's controversial Body and Soul. Before the 1970s, for example, Regester explains how scholars believed that Micheaux distrusted many people in society such as ministers and demonstrated this distrust in his films. This could help us understand Micheaux's negative depiction of the Reverend Jenkins in Body and Soul. According to Regester, critics before 1970 also condemned Micheaux for compromising his own identity in favor of white values in order to create successful films and make more money. This could be another plausible reason for Micheaux's negative depictions of blacks in his film Body and Soul; perhaps he was simply an opportunist, appealing to a white audience that would sell more tickets. In the 1970s, there was continued criticism of Micheaux's films for perpetuating demeaning images of blacks by whites. However, by the 1990s, Regester shows us that interpretations of Micheaux's films had shifted and it became more accepted that Micheaux should be commended for his portrayal of blacks in his films because they heightened racial tensions and increased audience awareness of race-related issues. These diverse interpretations are very useful in offering conceivable reasons for why Micheaux presented negative images of blacks in his film, Body and Soul.