The Complete Oscar Micheaux: Ten Minutes to Live (1932) with Veiled Aristocrats (1932)
Director: Oscar Micheaux Run Time: 106 min. Rating: NR Release Year: 1932
Starring: A.B. DeComathiere, Laura Bowman, Lawrence Chenault, Tressie Mitchell, Willor Lee Guilford
Country: United States
Language: English
The Complete Oscar Micheaux, presented from Thursday, September 19—Saturday, September 28, 2024. The program concludes with a limited engagement of the 2021 documentary Oscar Micheaux: The Superhero of Black Filmmaking on Sunday, September 29.
About the film:
Ten Minutes to Live (1932) is based on Oscar Micheaux’s unpublished short stories.
In Club Libya, a Harlem cabaret modeled on the Cotton Club, movie producer Gary Martin scouts for talent for his new film and has difficulty choosing between two talented singers, both named Ida. Meanwhile, club patron Anthony gets engaged to Letha Watkins, whose secret past re-emerges when she receives a note announcing that she has only 10 minutes to live.
“[Micheaux] had come into Black filmmaking when it hardly existed, creating much of its origins and giving it ballast and a heartbeat”
— Wil Haygood,Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World (2021)
This unique musical mystery has been mastered from materials preserved by the Museum of Modern Art.
The Veiled Aristocrats (1932) is Micheax’s sound remake of The House of Cedars (1925) based on Charles Chesnutt’s novel.
One of Micheaux’s most controversial films, Veiled Aristocrats (1932) addresses the question of the price of success in a middle class Black community through the story of racial “passing.” Lorenzo Tucker (known as the ‘Black Valentino’) stars in this story of a lawyer who returns home to find that his light-skinned sister is about to marry a dark-skinned man, while his mother has picked a more suitable candidate. The film has been restored in 4K by the George Eastman Museum.
About the filmmaker:
Oscar Devereaux Micheaux was an author, film writer and director, and independent producer of more than 44 silent films and sound films from 1919—1948. Micheaux was the first African American filmmaker to produce a full feature-length film and is regarded as a prominent producer of race films, and the most successful African American filmmaker of the first half of the 20th century. Micheaux’s work is not only a milestone in African American cinema, but an incredible insight into American history regarding race in society.
Born in 1884 to enslaved parents, Micheaux first left home to work for the railroads in Chicago. He had his sight set higher as a writer and a determined creative. He wrote a series of novels, including his self-published The Homesteader. Not only was Micheaux a pioneer in African American cinema, but also in independent publishing and filmmaking. After turning down offers to produce his novel into a film, he later found his own path to producing the 1919 film. Micheaux serves as a symbol of triumphing over the circumstances at hand to bring his vision to reality. The groundbreaking auteur’s features include The Symbol of the Unconquered (1920), Body and Soul (1925), Within Our Gates (1920) and Birthright (1938).
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