CIFF 2021: Oscar Micheaux—The Superhero of Black Cinema, Punch 9 for Harold Washington, Love Charlie: The Rise and Fall of Chef Charlie Trotter | Festivals & Awards

Of the three, the name that might not register immediately to much of the general public is Micheaux’s but as Francesco Zippel’s “Oscar Micheaux—The Superhero of Black Filmmaking” clearly demonstrates, he was a man with a life and career so astonishing that not only is it eminently worthy of documentary treatment but if someone tried to pitch it as a screenplay, there is a very good chance it might get rejected on the basis that his story was simply too good to be believable. Born in the town of Metropolis in 1884, Micheaux grew up on a farm and eventually made his way to Chicago, where he secured a job on the railroads as a Pullman porter, a position that offered him a decent salary and the chance to travel and interact with people he might not have encountered otherwise. He then used his savings to purchase some land in South Dakota that he worked as a homesteader. He took his experiences as a homesteader and turned them into a series of novels that he published and sold himself to great success. His third novel, The Homesteader (1918), would attract the attention of a film producer, but when he was unable to secure the amount of control over his material that he wanted, Micheaux turned it down and elected to make the film himself, using connections that he made as a porter and sales of shares from the production company he founded to finance it. This would kick off a filmmaking career that would consist of more than 40 films (including “Within Our Gates” [1920], a blistering riposte to “The Birth of a Nation,” and “Body and Soul” [1925], which marked the screen debut of Paul Robeson and which would be named to the National Film Registry in 2019) stretching until a couple of years before his passing in 1951 and make him, in the words of film scholar Jacqueline Stewart, “the most important black filmmaker who ever lived.”

Stewart is one of a number of contemporary voices on hand attesting to the importance of Micheaux and his work, ranging from academics to the late filmmakers John Singleton, Haskell Wexler and Melvin van Peebles, alongside archival materials and clips from a number of his surviving films. Granted, some of these clips may come across as a little stilted and awkward (especially the ones made after the shift from silent to talkies made it harder to overlook questionable acting), but when you consider that he was making these far outside the Hollywood system on budgets that could charitably be called shoestring, they do evoke a certain fascination. Film critic J. Hoberman once wrote a piece comparing Micheaux to Ed Wood and while I would disagree with that assessment, they did both demonstrate a burning desire to create cinema that could be detected despite the threadbare trappings of their respective works. More importantly, Micheaux’s work also demonstrated a strong social conscience that could not be denied—even a seemingly innocuous courtroom drama like “Murder in Harlem” (1935) was inspired by the infamous 1913 trial of Leo Frank for the murder of Mary Phagan, and a film like “Body and Soul” evokes a considerable amount of power to this day. Although never quite as groundbreaking as the works of Micheaux himself, Zippel’s film is nevertheless a fascinating reminder of a largely unsung part of American cinema history and should leave most viewers yearning to explore his work for themselves.

The name of Harold Washington, on the other hand, continues to have resonance with many people and, as is revealed in Joe Winston’s “Punch 9 for Harold Washington,” there was a point when it seemed as if the eyes of the world were on Chicago in the early months of 1983 when the one-time congressman shocked the political establishment by becoming the city’s first African-American mayor, a notion that even at that comparatively late date was seemingly unthinkable to many people. As the film shows, he managed to accomplish this task by taking advantage of the upheaval left by the death of long-running Mayor Richard J. Daley in 1976, the inability of successor Michael Bilandic to successfully handle the 1979 Chicago Blizzard and the disappointment over his successor, Jane Byrne. The election turned into a bitter contest when the Republicans, not to mention a number of high-ranking Democrats, fearing their possible loss of power to the Washington coalition, backed Bernard Epton, who ran a campaign so ugly and racially charged that in one of the film’s present interviews, his son practically weeps at the memory of the sheer ugliness on display.