fiction.wikisort.org - Director

Pearl Bowser (born 1931) is an author, television director, film director, producer, and film archivist.[1][2] She is the author of a book on the first ten years of the career of Oscar Micheaux, an African-American who directed 40 "race pictures" between 1918 and 1940.[3] She is thus credited for having helped rediscover some of Oscar Micheaux's rare surviving films.[4] She is the founder of African Diaspora Images, a collection of visual and oral histories that documents the history of African-American filmmaking.[5] Part of her journey includes teaching young people film in the 1960s and 1970s.[5]

Though Bowser initially set out to research the role of Black women in early African-American filmmaking, she eventually studied both genders because too few Black women were among the earliest African-American filmmakers.[5]

In 2012, Bowser gifted her library of films to the Smithsonian Institution's Center for African American Media Arts. These are maintained by Earl W. and Amanda Stafford and can be found at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. [6]

Early life

In 1931, Pearl Bowser was born in Harlem as the youngest of seven children. She frequented the movie theaters of Harlem along 125th street watching "Hollywood Westerns, B-movies and whatever black films were out at the time."[2]

Bowser discovered and joined an interracial club that gathered in the Bronx park, Tibbetts Brook, called the Paul Robeson Club. She was able to find a sense a of identity and pride from Robeson's club where he would share information about culture, art, and film.[2]

Career

Bowser stumbled upon her career in film when a friend, documentary filmmaker Ricky Leacock, asked her to work in his office where she helped out with billing and ordering equipment.[5] Bowser started teaching seminars and workshops on African-American and African film at universities, libraries and museums in 1971.[5] She was the director of the Theater Project at Third World Newsreel, the largest distributor of independent film by people of color in the United States, from 1978 to 1987.[5]

Filmography

• Namibia: Independence Now! (1985)[7]
• Wild Women Don't Have the Blues (1989)[7]
• Midnight Ramble: Oscar Micheaux and the Story of Black Movies (1994)[5]
• The Watermelon Woman (1996)
• Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film & Video (1998)[7]
• That's Black Entertainment: Westerns (2002)
• Secrets of New York (2005)[7]
• In the Shadow of Hollywood: Race Movies and the Birth of Black Cinema (2007)[7]

Publications

• Writing Himself Into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films, and His Audiences, 2000, Rutgers University Press [3]
• The History of Black Film, article in Black Film Review.[5]
• Oscar Micheaux and His Circle (Catalog)[5]

References

External links

• Pearl Bowser at IMDb

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