Currently On Sale On Sale: 2011 Archive On Sale: 2010 Archive On Sale: 2009 Archive Back By Popular Demand Charlie Chaplin Spanish Cinema Now FCS/YFF: Repo Man Chekhov Italian Neo-Realism SE: MJ's Video Art GS: The Hoodlum Youssef Chahine SE: Best Boy FCS: The Box SE: Gabriel Over... Grn. Scrns.: Fresh Czech Cinema GS: The Unholy Three The Wall Scary Movies 3 Latinbeat 09 Watershed First Run Features Gr. Scr.: No Impact Man SE: Keep Moving: MJ FCS: Last Days of Disco Natalie Wood SE: Amreeka I’m Gonna Explode IN: What’s the Matter... Films of Ang Lee YFF: ...Get Loud Toni Servillo Shakespeare FCS: Thirst GS: Man With Camera Gr. Scr.: Pig Business Grotowski Tarkovsky Movie Musicals SE: Phèdre SE: Monterey Pop The Secret Policeman IN: New Muslim Cool SE: Dick Rogers HRW Anniversary HRW 2009 New Italian Cinema SE: Woodstock Dardenne Bros. FCS: Friends of Eddie... Steve McQueen YFF: Bullitt SE: Three Daughters Being Jewish in France Forbidden Catalan Cinema SE: Wham Bam... Jancsó Classics Gr. Scr.: Bike Month FCS: 1991... Red Diva YFF/FCS: Jarmush YFF: Days and Nights... IN: Youth Knows No Pain China Indie Cinema MET Live: The Audition GS: The Unholy Threepostponed Satyajit Ray AFF 09 AFF Special Event Gr. Scr.: Addicted ...! FCS: Friends of Eddie... ND/NF Critic’s Choice Robert Mulligan Rendez-Vous YFF: A Week Alone SE: NYWIFT Film Comment Selects GS: Stella Dallas MET Live: di Lammermoor Oscar Micheaux Program Overview Birthright Blood of Jesus Body and Soul Cabin in the Sky Dirtie Gertie... Eleven P.M. The Exile The Flying Ace Girl from Chicago Girl in Room 20 Go Down Death God’s Step Children Hallelujah! In the Shadow Juke Joint Miracle in Harlem Moon Over Harlem Murder in Harlem The Scar of Shame Souls of Sin Swing! The Symbol... Ten Nights... Underworld Veiled Aristocrats Within Our Gates YFF: Days of Being Wild SE: Alvin Ailey Day Positif Celebrates... Cinematic Opera CO: Moses and Aaron SE: Lemon Tree MET Live: Orfeo SE: Remembering Richard NY Jewish Film Festival MET Live: La Rondine DOC 2009 SE: Red Gold SE: Playtime SE: Fincher in Person Fincher On Sale: 2008 Archive On Sale: 2007 Archive On Sale: 2006 Archive On Sale: 2005 Archive Archive 2005 - To April Archive 2004 - WRT Archive 2003 - WRT Archive 2002 - WRT Archive 2001 - WRT Archive 2000 - WRT Archive 1999 - WRT Archive 1998 - WRT Archive 1997 - WRT Archive 1996 - WRT

FADED GLORY Oscar Micheaux and Black Pre-War Cinema February 6 - 19, 2009 “Micheaux and his peers created a vital body of work out of technical limitations and social restrictions. If you haven’t seen these early examples of black filmmaking, you need to get down to Lincoln Center stat!” - Time Out New York "Whether chronicling the sacred or the profane, the films in 'Faded Glory' abound with show-stopping numbers... Walter Reade's invaluable series boasts other indelible performers whose careers tragically stalled or faded away due to the intractable racism in the movie business." - Melissa Anderson, Artforum.com “A prolific and inventive movie director… His work… offers a fascinating window into black America in the years between World War I and the beginning of the civil rights movement — a world of class division, color consciousness, striving and heartbreak that seems at once remarkably vivid and lost in time.” – A.O. Scott, The New York Times “One of the earliest and most prolific African-American auteurs, but far more momentous were both the dignified, stereotype-refuting doctrine of his oeuvre and the frustrating truth that many of his race films are lost and barely remembered today. Lincoln Center’s ‘Faded Glory’ retrospective impressively wrangles 35 rediscoveries and restorations from this revolutionary and his neglected contemporaries.” – Aaron Hillis, The Village Voice Click on Program Overview for a listing of the films in the series. For Today's Schedule and to purchase tickets online click here. The more you learn about Oscar Micheaux, the more remarkable he seems. A son of freed slaves, who left home early to become a successful farmer, writer, and publisher in South Dakota, he launched his own alternative cinema with his first film, based on his novel "The Homesteader," in 1919. Over the next 20 years he would be the most prolific author among an essential core of black filmmakers who sought to simply affirm the presence of African-American lives and culture in a medium whose biggest producers only illustrated them as servants, comic relief, or, most frequently, villains. The fact that so many of Micheaux’s films dealt with controversial and provocative subjects — racism, lynching, interracial romance, the “color bar” in the black community, corruption in black churches—makes his output almost miraculous. Beginning in the late 1910s and lasting through World War II, American “race movies,” as they were tellingly labeled, were predominately created by black filmmakers for black audiences to combat Jim Crow theaters and an exclusionary Hollywood production system. Though independent black filmmakers faced major financial and social obstacles, the movement resulted in some of early American cinema’s most imaginative film creators: Detroit’s Lincoln Motion Picture Company, Jacksonville’s Richard F. Norman Company (The Flying Ace), Philadelphia’s Colored Players Film Corporation (The Scar of Shame, Ten Nights in a Barroom), director Spencer Williams (five titles in the series), and producer William Alexander (Souls of Sin and multiple shorts). Unhappily, few of the films by Micheaux or his contemporaries — Spencer Williams, Richard Norman, Richard Maurice, William Alexander, and many others — have survived in pristine condition. The scratched, sometimes faded copies we’ll be showing are, for the moment, all that is available. Yet beyond the technical flaws or occasional awkwardness on screen is the tremendous authenticity of these films, the sense of a community raising the level of conversation within its own boundaries. At their best, they hold up a critical mirror to the struggles and tensions of an oppressed people. This series is screening in conjunction with a major conference on Micheaux organized by Prof. Jane Gaines, School of the Arts, Film Program, Columbia University. For a complete conference schedule and additional information, visit arts.columbia.edu Faded Glory is organized by Jane Gaines, Columbia University School of the Arts, and Richard Peña. Special thanks to Rick Worland, Southern Methodist University; Amy Turner, Head, G. William Jones Film and Video Collection, Southern Methodist University; Corey Creekmur, University of Iowa; Charles Musser, Yale University; Ron Green, The Ohio State University; and Pearl Bowser. Additional thanks to Columbia University Seminars; Columbia University School of the Arts, Film Division; Oscar Micheaux Society newsletter co-editor Charlene Regester, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; members of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies special interest group, The Oscar Micheaux Society for the Study of Early African American Cinema; Matthew Bernstein, Emory University; Andre Bugg, Duke University; Jakob Nilsson, Stockholm University; Thomas Williams, Columbia University; and event manager Daisy Nam, Columbia University School of the Arts. Oscar Micheaux, born in Metropolis, Ill., in 1884, was already a successful author and South Dakota homesteader when he entered the budding movie industry by founding The Micheaux Film and Book Publishing Corporation in Chicago in 1918. His first film, The Homesteader — based on his novel and now lost — launched the most prolific and one of the most adventurous careers in early independent filmmaking. Micheaux created nearly 40 films between 1919 and 1948. The majority of the director’s work — and that of his contemporaries — has been lost or destroyed.

Please note: The Gunsaulus Mystery is not being screened in the series as no print is known to exist in any archive or private collection.