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Silent Film/Live Music
$12/$8 for Real Art Ways Members
Real Art Ways will present acclaimed percussionist William Hooker, who will improvise a solo accompanying a rarely-seen film by the early African-American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. The program is 60 minutes and will be followed by an informal discussion in our lounge.
A native of New Britain, Connecticut, Hooker has an extensive and far-reaching career as a musician. He has strong roots and training in jazz, but has collaborated with such musicians as Sonic Youth’s Lee Renaldo and Thurston Moore, Alan Licht, and DJ Olive, to name a few. As critic Ty Cumbie suggests, "Hooker drives the music like a demonic charioteer, delivering potent, ferocious percussive tirades that, if anything, challenge the musicians to keep up. In building his music, he plays the roles of architect, engineer, and construction crew member."
Oscar Micheaux (1884-1951) was a pioneering African-American filmmaker. He was the first African-American to produce a film that was shown in "white" cinemas - and what makes this even more impressive was the work that he did in his films to reject racial stereotypes. He was prolific, directing more than forty feature-length films in his lifetime, many of which provided African-American actors the opportunity to play roles that were complex and challenging, rather than simplistic, stereotyped, and demeaning.
The Symbol of the Unconquered (1920) responds directly to D.W. Griffith's celebration of the Ku Klux Klan in The Birth of a Nation (1915), a film which some historians identify as the catalyst of the second emergence of the KKK. In his film, Micheaux inverts many of the typically racist characterizations - making perpetrators, villains, and rapists white, and protagonists and heros African-American.