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Transcription: [00:39:58]

{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
You-- you're nodding your head "Yes."

[[Cross Talk]]

{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
I'm- I'm looking at literature,

{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
You're trying to--

{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
I'm looking at films,
[00:40:03]

{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
I mean, I'm looking at songs, I'm looking at-- I look at-- well, what comes to mind, of course, is that-- Well,
[00:40:09]

{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
of course, a slew of songs that have a fairly Tin Pan Alley outline,
[00:40:16]

{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
that managed to get a whole lot said, or, the way in-- that impulse that we had, typically in the same 20s, taking a sonnet or some other usual form and making it work;
[00:40:28]

{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
Um, stretching its productivity, testing its productivity, can assign and incorporate and accommodate a lynching, protest statement about lynching, which is of course what [[Cord?]] McKay does.
[00:40:39]

{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}"
in [[inaudible]]. But I was looking at songs, too, um, when Nina Simone in the 60s
[00:40:47]

{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
announces as she sits down to play "Mississippi Goddam," this is a show tune; they haven't written the show yet, and gives us that very jumpy, corny, totally predictable, music,
[00:41:00]

{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
you know, oum-pa-pa kinda-- couldn't be cornier, to give us "Mississippi Goddamn," it's absolutely in the tradition of improvisation,
[00:41:11]

{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
of making mus-- of recycling, of making mus-- It's a, it's just a form--

[[Cross Talk]]

{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
it's "and I'm gonna make it work for me."

{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
Exactly, right.
[00:41:16]

{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
As George Washington Carver, he's this lovely peanut launcher.
[00:41:21]

{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}So you think that's operative in the movies? In, Micheaux's movies?
[00:41:26]

{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
Oh yeah, we're just stunned. I think it's characteristic.
[00:41:32]

{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
Can you think of any other aspects of um, so looking at Micheaux's work,
[00:41:39]

{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
and are we just looking at Micheaux and not at a number of other people's because he's,
[00:41:46]

{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
of all of the race moviemakers - African Americans moviemakers - was the most productive,
[00:41:56]

{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
and so more of his work seems to have survived. And he was perhaps the most contentious of the lot,
[00:42:04]

{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
so that things are leaning more obvious in terms of his drive and motivation.
[00:42:12]

{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
But those things that are characteristic of Micheaux films, that come out of the African American experience;
[00:42:26]

{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
they're not - or are they encoded elements of Blackness?
[00:42:35]

{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
I mean, could you identify a film that has those elements in it as a Black film?
[00:42:44]

{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
Is that something that,I guess-- I'm trying to get back at the aesthetic element--
[00:42:51]

{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
that is something that one can take as, not as a legacy, but a continuum from Oscar Micheaux's work
[00:42:59]

{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
and relate it to say, some contemporary?
[00:43:04]

{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
Spike Lee, for instance. Do you see a parallel between?
[00:43:11]

{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
I, um. One of the reasons I was bringing up music, literature, or whatever, I think that's the test. Can you run - can you run, the characteristic through [[siren blaring]] the total continuum?
[00:43:23]

{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
And does it also show up? The contemporary film. You know what I mean.
[00:43:30]

{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
Yeah,uh, wait til the --

{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
Okay.
[00:43:31]

{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
Patty Watty goes by.

{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
Gotta be careful about that; that's an anti-Irish statement.
[laughter]
[00:43:38]

{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"} Sorry, I'll retract it. [[??]] of the tape. Um, you wanna repeat what you just said?
[00:43:48]

{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
I know that you're attempting to establish a cinematic aesthetic
[00:43:55]

{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
Um, but I think that prior to that, if we're talking about blackness and encoding Blackness,
[00:44:03
]
{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
whatever trait that is, can we trace through all of the culture practice.
[00:44:13]

{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
That's the test, which is why I keep bringing up magazines, poetry, music, or whatever.
[00:44:17]

{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
If it doesn't withstand that test, then it's questionably Black.
[00:44:22]

{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
Also, too. I mean, because a lot of - It's hard to judge Micheaux in some ways because
[00:44:31]

{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
so much of his work is fragmentary. And the other thing is film really was part of a whole presentation
[00:44:40]

{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
and it's almost like just having certain scenes
[00:44:53]

{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
of you know August Wilson's plays [[chuckle]] or maybe even, I don't know, and trying to reconstruct.

{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
reconstructing [[?]].
[00:45:01]

{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
Or not even that. Or maybe just having a film versions of certain scenes of August Wilson's plays.
[00:45:09]

{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
Part of it was the music, part of it was the context and you know, the entire film. And uh, so - so it's hard to judge.
[00:45:23]

{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"} Does the audience help to define the film?
[00:45:26]

{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
One thing, that, you know-- The thing, in terms of subject matter, that really always pokes its head out in these Micheaux films is this color thing
[00:45:35]

{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
Which, ah, it's really hard in 1992 to understand all of the intrigues of color,
[00:45:49]

{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
which are so central to the, especially in the 20s, not to say that there aren't color issues in 1992,
[00:45:56]

{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
but it's still--

{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
What was the context? What were the feelings then? What was being said then? What were the jokes?
[00:46:01]

{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
And so much had to do with love, you know.

{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
Yes.
[00:46:05]

{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
I mean, love and color is so-- they're so tied, you know, in Micheaux's films.
[00:46:13]

{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
Love and color; could you expand on that?

{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
Um.
[00:46:19]

{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
[[siren]] In "Symbol of the Unconquered," for example, Van Allen, the hero prospector,
[00:46:27]

{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
his reluctance to respond to Eva, Eve, the heroin's presence--
[00:46:37]

{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
her nearness; her obvious attraction to him or certainly her trust; her comfort with him;
[00:46:47]

{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
and his hanging fully back because he perceives her as white, and then two years later, when he-- after reading the letter
[00:46:57]

{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
and realizes she's Black, and then we wind down to end of the movie, or what we think is the end of the movie, with the iris out, and on the lovers.
[00:47:08]

Transcription Notes:
Not following INSTRUCTIONS again. Need speaker designations for all, a space in between dialogues, and speaker names need to be changed around. Timestamps need to be inserted in several places. MICHEAUX is the filmmaker that is being discussed. Dialogues go UNDER the speaker's name. All that has to be fixed. PLEASE READ INSTRUCTIONS AND WATCH VIDEOS