From the early days of cinema, Black independent filmmakers have been making films outside the confines of the Hollywood system. Their films explored different forms of Black identity and important race issues while eschewing the harmful stereotypes that were commonly found in mainstream entertainment. These artists often worked with small budgets and limited resources and would source local Black communities for talent. Funding was hard to come by and theatrical releases weren’t a given. In many cases, these independent films languished in obscurity only to be re-discovered decades after they were made. Even with all these roadblocks, these talented filmmakers persisted. Through their work they created a cinematic landscape in which they could tell stories with dignity and pride. And for Black performers, these films were an opportunity to portray authentic characters in more substantial roles.
In historian Wil Haygood’s book “Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World,” he writes “[Black Americans] needed someone to tell their stories, stories with nuance and honesty and respect and comedy and joy—all the things that this magical thing called cinema was offering to mainstream society. And if such a person were to emerge, he would have to possess fortitude, and a wide vision that would remain steadfast against the forces sure to rise and be arrayed against him.” Oscar Micheaux was just that person. As the pioneer of Black filmmaking, Micheaux’s work was deeply personal. Horrified by the depiction of Black people in D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), Micheaux sought to change the narrative with films like Within Our Gates (1920) and The Symbol of the Unconquered (1920). In the latter, he depicted Black characters who defeat the Ku Klux Klan in a triumphant battle. Micheaux worked tirelessly over the years. He wrote his own novels and scripts, directed and produced his own films then distributed them himself by traveling across the country. His films were a way to breakdown social barriers through education and representation. In the documentary, Oscar Micheaux: The Superhero of Black Filmmaking (2021) film producer Nicole London notes that “every Black filmmaker has Oscar Micheaux to thank for opening the door.”
Micheaux set the scene for race films, a genre of independent films that featured all Black casts with stories that catered to Black audiences. Norman Studios, run by white filmmaker Richard E. Norman, was one of the first studios to focus primarily on race films. Located in Jacksonville, Florida, Norman Studios produced silent films with all-Black casts from 1919 until 1928. Norman would make a deal with local communities to shoot on location and to source local talent. The only surviving film from this studio is The Flying Ace (1926), an aviation themed drama featuring a character loosely based on Black aviator Bessie Coleman.
Spencer Williams, best known for his role on the TV show Amos ’n’ Andy, worked both within and outside of the studio system. When he wasn’t making movies for Poverty Row studio Christie, he worked in Texas with producer Alfred N. Sack on independent films. His collaboration with Sack resulted in 10 films made in 10 years. The most popular of these was The Blood of Jesus (1941) a religious picture that reveled in Christian mythology. It was made on a budget of just $5k and proved to be a hit among Black Southern Baptists. Five years later Williams made Dirty Gertie from Harlem, U.S.A. (1946), an unauthorized adaptation of “Rain” by W. Somerset Maugham that changed the particulars including characters and setting to appeal to a Black audience. The film stars Francine Everett, known as “the most beautiful woman in Harlem” who struggled to make it in Hollywood but found some success in the race circuit. Williams himself plays a small role in drag, a precursor to Tyler Perry’s Madea character that came decades later.
One of the last race films ever made, the crime drama Souls of Sin (1949), was the collaboration of Black filmmakers Powell Lindsay and William D. Alexander. Lindsay was a theatrical director and Alexander was a radio broadcaster and documentarian who started his own company Alexander Productions. Both filmmakers focused on telling stories about the Black middle class and the Black experience. Among the cast members of Souls of Sin was a young William Greaves, who was then an aspiring actor but would soon start working behind the camera and usher in a new era of Black independent filmmaking.
Greaves studied at the Actor’s Studio and was part of the American Negro Theatre. He soon became frustrated with the stereotypical roles offered to Black actors and began working behind the camera as a documentarian. Documentary filmmaking wasn’t a prestigious career to pursue but Greaves found it to be just as a creative of an outlet as narrative feature films. His experimental documentary Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968) is unlike anything else that had been made up to that point. It blends realism with fiction with Greaves playing a character of an inept and misogynistic filmmaker while everyone around him, cast, crew and bystanders, all believe he’s making a documentary titled Over the Cliff. One film crew documents two actors auditioning for a movie, a second film crew films that crew at work and a third film crew captures everything else, including the crew criticizing Greaves’ work. Greaves took the film to the Cannes Film Festival but due to an error, the reels were shown out of order and never screened. It would go on to become a cult classic and landmark in experimental filmmaking.
In the 1970s, UCLA became the home of the L.A. Rebellion, a film movement born out of a volatile time in America’s history when Black student filmmakers were ushering a new wave of storytelling. According to UCLA, “what makes the L.A. Rebellion movement a discovery worthy of a place in film history is the vitality of its filmmakers, their utopian vision of a better society, their sensitivity to children and gender issues, their willingness to question any and all received wisdom, their identification with the liberation movements in the Third World, and their expression of Black pride.” Founding members of this movement included Larry Clark, Haile Gerima, Charles Burnett, Billy Woodberry, Jamaa Fanaka and Julie Dash.
Best known for his hit film Penitentiary (1979), Jamaa Fanaka was a bold filmmaker who explored the importance of community and identity in his films. While working on his master’s thesis for UCLA, he made Emma Mae (1976), a film about an orphaned teen who faces a new reality when she moves from Mississippi to South Central Los Angeles. To keep costs down, Fanaka used student actors, volunteers from the community to play extras and a nonunion crew. While Fanaka did not intend to make a blaxploitation film, Emma Mae seemed to have crossover potential and was re-titled Black Sister’s Revenge to take advantage of the blaxploitation craze.
Charles Burnett is a key figure in the L.A. Rebellion movement as both an acclaimed filmmaker and a generous collaborator. His films focus on working-class Black families and deal with the theme of identity while also denouncing stereotype. His master’s thesis Killer of Sheep (1978) was a critical success and received numerous awards but did not receive a commercial release. His compelling tragicomedy My Brother’s Wedding (1983), set in his home community of Watts, explored the dichotomy of lower and middle-class communities and the underlying threat of violence in an otherwise tightknit community. Unfortunately, the production suffered from delays and rushed distribution to the film festival circuit. Burnett couldn’t create a true director’s cut until 2007 when the film was finally released in its finished form to the public. After My Brother’s Wedding, Burnett collaborated with fellow L.A. Rebellion filmmaker Billy Woodberry on his film Bless Their Little Hearts (1983). This gripping realist drama focuses on the inner workings of a single Black family. This was Woodberry’s master’s thesis for UCLA and Burnett wrote the screenplay and worked as the camera man on the production.
Emerging out of a male dominated industry, the work of Julie Dash was like a breath of fresh air. As part of her studies at UCLA she made the thought-provoking short film Illusions (1982) which explored race, passing and sexual discrimination in 1940s Hollywood. The two female protagonists grapple with what it means to be a Black woman working in the studio system. Years later, Dash made her best-known film Daughters of the Dust (1991). Inspired by her Gullah ancestors, this story about a Black woman on the eve of the Great Migration, is told with a non-linear narrative, stunning on location shooting and costumes which give this critically acclaimed film a decidedly poetic feel. The film concept was rejected by Hollywood, but Dash was able to get funding from PBS’ American Playhouse for the production.
Horace B. Jenkins and Kathleen Collins’s contributions to the history of Black cinema have recently been re-discovered and appreciated for their unique explorations of Black identity. Jenkins worked mainly as a television producer and script consultant. His only movie, Cane River (1982), was made with both an all-Black cast and an all-Black crew. This romantic drama set in one of the original free communities of color, explores internalized racism and the legacy of slavery. According to IndieWire, actor Richard Pryor was impressed with the film and wanted “to use his star power to help get it out.” But the patrons that funded the film, who took over distribution after Jenkins’ untimely death, declined the offer and the film remained unseen. A print was unearthed in 2013 and was finally released to the public in 2018. Collins was a poet, teacher, activist and filmmaker who wrote and directed two movies including Losing Ground (1982), one of the first feature length movies directed by a Black woman. Filmed in upstate New York, the film follows a philosophy professor and her artist husband who are discovering themselves while their marriage falls apart. Despite the film’s success on the festival circuit, it never received a theatrical release.
With the growth of television, Black independent filmmakers sought opportunities to make films with government and public television funding. The first two films ever funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities were made by Black directors: Stan Lathan’s A House Divided: Denmark Vessey’s Rebellion (1982) and Gordon Parks’ Solomon Northup’s Odyssey (1984). Both films explored slavery in America with protagonists who were free Black men. Lathan had extensive experience working on television, most notably directing pilots for hit shows like Sanford and Son and Cagney & Lacey. Gordon Parks, best known for starting the blaxploitation genre along with Melvin Van Peebles, had an impressive career as a photographer, writer, musician and filmmaker. Both A House Divided and Solomon Northup’s Odyssey were massive hits and Ebony magazine noted that they “drew the largest Black viewership of any PBS show.” Another success for PBS’ American Playhouse series was The Killing Floor (1984), a provocative drama about labor unions and the Chicago Race Riot of 1919. Directed by Bill Duke, The Killing Floor was the result of PBS’ mission to offer diverse programming to the public and Congressional pressure for PBS to devote airtime to issues regarding American labor. It was only intended to be a television movie but was so successful that it went on the festival circuit and got a limited theatrical release.
Funding was often hard to come by and without a major source, filmmakers would reach deep into their own pockets. Actor-turned-director Robert Townsend maxed out 10 personal credit cards to partially fund his skit-based comedy Hollywood Shuffle (1987). Frustrated with the lack of opportunities for Black actors, Townsend pokes fun at Hollywood filmmaking in this comedy. Hollywood Shuffle was filmed over two weeks, crew members wore UCLA shirts so they could pass off as students while filming for free on campus and Townsend received free film stock from previous productions he’d worked on. This guerrilla style approach paid off when Hollywood Shuffle was a hit, earning $2 million in the first 2 months as it went on to earn over $5 million off its $100,000 budget.
Charles Lane’s homage to Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid (1921) found support from executive producers who took out a second mortgage on their house to fund the film. Sidewalk Stories (1989) is a mostly silent, Black-and-white film about a street artist who raises an orphan child. It was a critical success, earning a standing ovation and a Prix du Publique award from Cannes. Disney made an offer to remake it with sound, color and Tom Hanks in the lead role but Lane turned down the offer. Carl Franklin’s gritty neo-noir drama One False Move (1992) almost didn’t get distributed. According to the AFI, “the producers were concerned that it would not be released theatrically and go direct to video because of its lack of star actors and its inability to be categorized in one genre.” While it wasn’t a box-office success, both Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel called the film one of the best of the year.
In the 1990s, two women directors came onto the scene breaking new ground in the world of Black cinema. Liberian born and Philly raised Cheryl Dunye became the first Black lesbian to direct a feature film. Her debut The Watermelon Woman (1996) was a landmark of both Black and LGBTQ cinema. Dunye looked to film history for inspiration but when she was unable to find a lesbian Black figure from early Hollywood, she made up her own. The Watermelon Woman was a passion project for Dunye who not only wrote, directed and starred in the film but also garnered funding through grants and crowdsourcing. Zeinabu irene Davis, one of the youngest members of the L.A. Rebellion, was inspired by a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar to make her film Compensation (1999). This Black-and-white film, set at the beginning and end of the 20th century, tells two different stories of a deaf woman, played by deaf actress Michelle A. Banks, and a hearing man both living in Chicago during two very different pandemics.
These pioneers of Black independent filmmaking laid the groundwork for Black directors working today. Steve McQueen burst onto the scene, after making a series of experimental short films, with his feature film debut Hunger (2008). He was inspired by Gordon Parks’ Solomon Northup’s Odyssey to make 12 Years a Slave (2013) which went on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Before Moonlight (2016), Barry Jenkins made his feature film debut with Medicine for Melancholy (2008) a mumblecore romance set in San Francisco and made on a tight schedule and microbudget. And one of the most versatile women filmmakers working today, Ava DuVernay, made her debut with her poignant indie documentary This Is the Life (2008).
For more about movies from Black Independent filmmakers, please check the following works from TCM host Jacqueline Stewart, Migrating to the Movies (2005), L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema (2015), and William Greaves: Filmmaking as Mission (2021).
