Directed by Oscar Micheaux • 1931 • United States
Starring Tim Moore, Andrew Trible, Amon Davis
As a filmmaker, Oscar Micheaux was something of a firebrand, but his attitudes and methods were anything but predictable—often leveling criticism at certain strata of the African American community. His most outrageous film is a traditional minstrel show—an olio of broad comedy and choral interludes. It is an acknowledgement of minstrelsy as a defining tradition of African American stage performance (see also the blackface routines in Micheaux’s TEN MINUTES TO LIVE). If nothing else, THE DARKTOWN REVUE is an invaluable historical document for recording on film the “Hard Shell Sermon” routine popularized by turn-of-the-century minstrel performer Amon Davis. But there is something else. True to form, Micheaux’s depiction of a minister is not flattering. Davis’s comic sermon of gibberish is a scathing satire of charismatic religion, made even more troubling by the fact that it is performed by a black man in blackface. By the same token, one cannot help but wonder if Micheaux was further provoking his audience by having the uplifting Donald Heywood choir open the film with a rendition of “Watermelon Time.”
Up Next in Part 2: Shorts and rarities
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Hot Biskits
Directed by Spencer Williams • 1931 • United States
Starring Thurston Briggs, Spencer WilliamsVirtually unseen for more than eighty years, Spencer Williams’s first film is a one-reel comedy short in which a rivalry between two men is played out in a high-stakes game of mini golf.
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We Work Again
Director Unknown • 1937 • United States
The role of African Americans in the recovery years of the Great Depression is the subject of this informational short, which offers an idealized depiction of life in a segregated society. The highlight, by far, is rare footage of Orson Welles’s “Voodoo Ma...
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Zora Neale Hurston Fieldwork Footage
Directed by Zora Neale Hurston • 1928 • United States
While a student of anthropologist Franz Boas at Columbia University, Zora Neale Hurston embarked on a journey through Alabama and Florida, using a 16 mm camera to capture life among the rural African American communities she found there. Hurs...
