The following is an excerpt from a 2008 Time article written by Richard Corliss.
The first black to direct a silent feature, and the first to direct a
talkie feature, Oscar Micheaux was the D.W. Griffith of race cinema. And
also its Edward D. Wood, Jr. An unquestioned pioneer who wrote,
produced, directed, financed and distributed his own films, Micheaux
made movies for 30 years, yet remained ignorant of the basic craft and
the visual grammar of the medium; by any normal standard, his no-budget,
no-retake films are defiantly, fascinatingly bad. His declared mission
was to “uplift the race,” but did it by showing light-skinned blacks
(usually women) as ethically superior to those of a darker shade
(usually men, who are derided as slaves to crap games and numbers
rackets). God’s Step Children may not be Micheaux’s
masterpiece, but in going even farther than his other films in its
wildly jumbled plot lines, its twisted racial politics and its ability
to storm past coherence toward an anguished emotional epiphany, the
movie is certainly his most-erpiece.
Click here for the full article.
Source: http://entertainment.time.com
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