Oscar Micheaux & His Circle African-American Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era

Pearl Bowser is founder and director of African Diaspora Images, a collection of historical and contemporary African-American and African films and memorabilia. Since 1970 she has curated film programs in Europe, Asia, Africa, and throughout the United States including the Whitney Museum, the American Museum of the Moving Images, the Brooklyn Museum, the Pacific Film Archives (Berkeley), and the Cleveland Museum of Art as well as a tour of black colleges. Her production credits include Mississippi Triangle (1984), Namibia Independence Now (1986), and Stories About Us (1988). She was co-director and director of research for Midnight Ramble: Oscar Micheaux and the Story of Race Movies (1994). With Louise Spence, she co-authored Writing Himself into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films, and His Audiences (2000).Jane Gaines is Professor of Literature and English at Duke University, where she directs the Film and Video Program, which she founded in 1985. She has co-edited Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body (1990), edited Classical Hollywood Narrative Cinema: The Paradigm Wars (1992), and published Contested Culture: The Image the Voice and the Law (1991) for which she received the Katherine Singer Kovacs Award. Her recent work is in African and African-American literature and film melodrama. Her book Fire and Desire: Mixed-Race Movies in the Silent Era has been recently published by University of Chicago Press (2001).Charles Musser is Professor of American Studies and Film Studies at Yale University, where he co-chairs the Film Studies Program. His books include The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (1990) and Edison Motion Pictures, 1890-1900: An Annotated Filmography (1998). He produced, directed, and co-wrote the hour-long documentary film Before the Nickelodeon: The Early Cinema of Edwin S. Porter (1982). With Ed Guerrero and Mark Reid, he curated Paul Robeson film retrospectives at UCLA Film & Television Archives and the Museum of Modern Art, mounted in conjunction with the touring exhibition Paul Robeson: Artist and Citizen. In 1996, he received the Prix Jean Mitry from the Giornate del Cinema Muto for his contribution to the study of silent film.Bowser, Pearl is the author of 'Oscar Micheaux & His Circle African-American Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era' with ISBN 9780253339942 and ISBN 0253339944.