The Complete Oscar Micheaux: The Exile (1931)
Director: Oscar Micheaux Run Time: 93 min. Rating: NR Release Year: 1931
Starring: Charles Moore, Eunice Brooks, Stanley Morrell
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:
Previously screened at the Film Center as a part of Pioneers of African American Cinema.
Based on Micheaux’s novel, The Conquest, a young man named Jean in post-World War I Chicago falls in love with a beautiful girl named Edith. He proposes to her, but realizes she’s involved in the rackets and won’t leave. He later leaves her to head home in South Dakota where he becomes a successful rancher and falls in love with a white girl, but guilt from Chicago drives him back. He later runs into Edith again and re-sparks their relationship, leading to a murder case where Jean is blamed.
“Micheaux has made a wonderful effort in producing ‘The Exile’”
— George Tyler, Baltimore Afro-American
This is the earliest surviving sound feature by an African American filmmaker. In this film, distinct changes are noticed in Micheaux’s visual style, dialogue exchanges, and camera techniques. Similarly, much of Hollywood at the time went though he same stylistic transition during the Dawn of Sound. This monumental feature film has been mastered from materials preserved by the Library of Congress.
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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