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Transcription: [00:09:23]

{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
I'd like to get back for a moment to this love and color,
[00:09:33]

{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
not theme, but the idea of--
[[pauses]]
[00:09:41]

{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
Some critics of Micheaux have alluded to his preoccupation with color,
[00:09:54]

{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
and it's always within this romantic context
[00:09:58]

{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
of man and woman, and the woman is the one rediscovering her identity, or her identity becoming compatible,
[00:10:10]

{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
so the story has a happy ending.
[00:10:12]

{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
Is that not a kind of simplistic way of looking at Micheaux's films in terms of the way the characters look?
[00:10:26]

{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
There's always this illusion that not only is the character a mulatto woman, but she is the beautiful mulatto.
[00:10:37]

{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
The, you know-- all kinds of adjectives that go along with that seem to heighten the whiteness of it;
[00:10:48]

{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
this kind of standard of beauty. So, that concept, to me, seems to be outside of the culture and not--
[00:10:57]

{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
In some ways, it's as if 50 years from now, we were to look at--
[00:11:07]

{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
She's gotta have it as a film that looked at
[00:11:14]

{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
someone's notion of changing role of women and relationships in the 1980s,
[00:11:24]

{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
And I think many people will say, "Well, this is kind of simplistic, and it doesn't succeed."
[00:11:34]

{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
But, you know, as we sort of started out with, I mean that narrative, uh, has currency; you know,
[00:11:45]

{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
the love and color has currency in the 20s, and the changing role of women in relationships may have currency in the 80s.
[00:11:54]

{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
But that's not really where the film is resting.
[00:11:59]

{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
the film is resting on the very fact of its existence; the very fact that you are seeing this very wide variety of characters that you don't see in Hollywood films,
[00:12:08]

{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
in the recontextualization, sort of political side of the show,
[00:12:15]

{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
and it's there because it's currently of interest, but I don't that that's --
[00:12:29]

{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
If one goes to Micheaux and only learns something about, or thinks that the sole gift is to get some kind of understanding
[00:12:38]

{SPEAKER name="Louis Massiah"}
of color consciousness of the 20s, I think you're missing the weight and the value of Micheaux.
[00:12:46]

{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
And wouldn't you say, Pearl, that those critics who, um, reduce the work of Micheaux
[00:12:56]

{SPEAKER name="Toni Cade Bambara"}
to the one drop of color preoccupation of it more in the films of the sound period. It's films of the sound period.
{SILENCE}
[00:13:05]

{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
Um, yes, yes. And it sort of swings the podium back to dismissing the work
[00:13:15]

{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
because of the poor production values which are very obvious, and you do it on two levels.
[00:13:21]


{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
You dismiss them because they're not just low-budget,
[00:13:30]

{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
but they're, they break all the rules so to speak.
[00:13:36],

{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
So you don't have to, you don't explore the films for themselves in terms of trying to contextualize them,
[00:13:43]

{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
you just dismiss them because they don't fit into the mold, um--
[00:13:49]

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