The Godmother of Black Independent Cinema

Over her five-decade career, Pearl Bowser (1931-2023) was on a mission to discover and revive Black moving images. She acquired a vast spectrum of Black films, videos, and audiotapes and founded African Diaspora Images to preserve the work of independent Black filmmakers. In 2012, Bowser donated her collection of sound cassettes, oral histories, 16-mm motion picture films, and VHS tapes to the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. The films in her collection included the 1955 feature Rhythm and Blues Revue compiled by Studio Films Inc. and Julie Dash’s 1975 experimental film Four Women.

Bowser was also a leading scholar on work by the filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. She rediscovered a number of his rare and forgotten films, such as the 1931 romantic drama The Exile, which follows Jean Baptiste (played by Stanley Morrell) as he struggles to navigate two opposing relationships. The black-and-white film would later be given as part of Bowser’s collection to the Smithsonian. Regarded as a trailblazer in the world of cinema, Oscar Micheaux challenged Hollywood’s racist depictions of Black Americans during the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s with his portfolio of 40 films. His genre-spanning films were featured in roughly 700 theaters across America. Alongside co-author and professor of media studies at Sacred Heart University Louise Spence, Bowser penned Writing Himself into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films, and His Audiences.

Though Bowser was known as the “godmother” of Black independent cinema, she was a filmmaker too. Her directorial debut, Midnight Ramble, aired in 1994 as part of the PBS series The American Experience. The hour-long documentary explored the knotty history of Black “race films” during the Hollywood Golden Age.

Pearl Bowser died last year at the age of 92. We revisit some interviews she did with documentary filmmaker and Scribe Video Center founder Louis Massiah in 2001 and 2002. Massiah and Bowser discuss her early introduction to Micheaux and the filmmaker’s impact on her research, as well as the origins and political underpinnings of representing Black interior life on-screen. They end with her fond recollections of her childhood living in New York, her kinship with Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson, the crime boss who provided aid to many in Harlem, and the first book she ever took home from his library.

The interviews were originally edited by Nobu Massiah and were condensed for Seen by Zoë Greggs.

Louis Massiah: Can you trace your relationship with Oscar Micheaux? When did you decide to focus on him as a scholar?

Pearl Bowser: Micheaux was the beginning of my interest in researching film. It’s what took me into dealing with the history of Black cinema. And because Micheaux’s work was one of the few surviving films of that period, his work is what I used primarily. His films opened up this whole new area of study in terms of finding other voices of that period, talking to actors and actresses of that period who were informed or who worked with Micheaux, because they also knew what else was going on during this period.

And then in 1969 Charles Hobson approached me to do the fieldwork for a film project on Black films. Actually, it was to be a book project that turned out to be a film festival. He wanted me to find film and go to Washington to look at what they had. When I started the research, I was part of a team, and when they ran out of money, I was the only person left there.

If you think about the very beginnings of Black filmmaking, and I think of it as a movement, those first stories were attempts to tell what was happening in the community, to put something of Black life on the screen. You could describe them as being perhaps newsreels, but they were events—and the events were important because the events were not being documented elsewhere, and the events certainly were not part of the mainstream cinema. People wanted to capture their own history because they were participants in their own history.

Did the independent Black film movement have a manifesto?

The sense I had of the mission was they wanted to document the culture, whatever was going on, whether it was in the streets or part of the controversial issues that Blacks were encountering during this period. They wanted to document it themselves. When the civil rights movement was taking place in the streets, they took their cameras to document it—so it was their voice as opposed to the news, quote, unquote. There wasn’t a lack of politics in these elements, because the art itself very often was expressive of the political thrust of the community.

Were these filmmakers trying to do new things in terms of structure, camera, or was it more content?

Content was certainly a part of it. But I think you had people involved who were filmmakers that came from a variety of different backgrounds. For instance, there was one filmmaker, Stan Lathan, whose background was in theater. When you look at [his] documentaries, they had a dramatic quality to them. They were somewhat theatrical, but they were different and had a kind of poetry. Bill Greaves was more the strict documentarian. It wasn’t just talking heads, but it was that news kind of approach to the documentaries—although as an editor, I think Bill Greaves was able to transform his documentaries into something else.

How did movies fit into your childhood?

It was interesting because movies were like the babysitter. On Saturdays, when my mother had to work and I was still very young, she would give my oldest brother a dollar and he would take us to the movies on 125th Street, the Harlem Opera House, where there was a matron who kind of policed the aisles to make sure all the kids behaved. And my brother would buy a large bottle of soda pop at Crest’s across the street from the movie house and a big bag of broken cookies, and we would spend the afternoon literally watching westerns, two features, cartoons, newsreels. So, we were in the movie house for at least three hours, it would seem. [My mother] worked at the other end of Fifth Avenue, when she was a domestic, [so] she would be home by the time we got out of the movies.

What occupied your mind then?

I wanted to kind of prove myself and I couldn’t do it through language, so I would do drawings and sort of scribbling writings. And it was nothing of any real worth, because I was going to school in Harlem and I can remember that we weren’t allowed to take the textbooks home. I can even remember the first book my mother bought me, which was a coloring book. It was on my sixth birthday, and we didn’t have books in the house.

Around the corner from where I lived on 120th Street was Bumpy Johnson, and he had an enormous library. He was like the pied piper for the kids in the neighborhood, because he would bring the kids up to his house to count his money. He was a numbers runner on Saturdays and he was always buying ice cream and other things for the kids, because he loved kids, and he tried to encourage the kids to do right. So, when we would go to his house to count the money, we could borrow a book from his library, but we couldn’t just borrow a book. We had to take it home and read it, and then the next time we came to his house, he would question us about the book. So, the first book that I pulled off his shelf was Nietzsche.

Really?

Yes, yes. And I think I did that because he talked a lot about Nietzsche, you know, because he was like a father figure. I sort of thought of him as somebody who was very important, because he had all these books and the respect of the neighborhood. He was the only one who had a car. He had a Cadillac. He was the only one that we knew that lived in this house on 120th Street that had a doorman. Right off Mount Morris Park, which is where I played as a child and got chased by other girl gangs or whatnot.

What are you working on now?

Buddy Tate, a concert in London, England. He’s playing with a British band, and it was shot on film sometime around the 1970s. It’s part of the John Baker Film collection. The city of Kansas, Missouri, bought the collection, and it’s housed at the American Jazz Museum. It’s really a wonderful, almost encyclopedic look at film and film performances of American jazz.

What I do is look at the film as it comes out of the can. I look to see if there are any splices in the film, the quality of the sound in the picture, and try to date it, as well as identify some of the performers in it and the location. There are some interesting soundies, which were these short films that were made for jukeboxes and were shown in public places. Sometimes they appeared on-screen in a movie house as shorts.

Some soundies featured different kinds of performances. One of the performances is like a religious parable where you have a blues singer who is singing the text from the Bible in a blues format, and on the stage is a group of people who are acting out, almost like a pantomime. We’re talking about the ’30s and ’40s. When you add the handful of Black performers and Black producers that were working in soundies, you got some really interesting stuff.

There are, you know, some wonderful moments in these soundies where there’s talent that is just so exciting. You wonder why these people didn’t get more play or why we don’t know more about them.