Two by a Pioneer Black Filmmaker

Beyond Baroque/Literary Arts Center presents Oscar Micheaux’s “Ten Minutes to Live” (1932) and “God’s Step Children” (1937) Thursday at 8 p.m.

Without a doubt, Micheaux, the pioneer black filmmaker, is one of the most problematical figures in the history of the American cinema. With drive and enterprise he managed to make some 30 features over three decades, beginning about 1919, for African-American audiences.

He was hampered not only by minuscule budgets but also by having little cinematic flair, yet all his films, no matter how dogged or downright inept, are expressive of the aspirations of the black middle class. He favored light-skinned players, and no matter how amateurish, he insisted they speak as if they were practicing an old-fashioned elocution exercise.

“Ten Minutes to Live” is rambling to the point of tediousness, set in a Harlem nightclub and eavesdropping (between revue acts) into the lives of various patrons, each of whom is caught up in the most lurid, improbable crisis.

“God’s Step Children” is another matter entirely, a film that critic Jim Hoberman links with D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” and John Ford’s “The Searchers” in regard to their “internalized American racist attitudes,” stating flatly that, “They are the three richest, most harrowing delineations of American social psychology to be found on celluloid.”

Combining aspects of “Imitation of Life” and “These Three,” it is the story of the fate of a white--or almost white--foundling raised by a loving but suffocatingly sanctimonious black woman. A troublesome child who wants to attend a white school and spreads gossip, she is packed off to a convent school for 12 years only to return home to fall in love with her handsome foster brother, already engaged to his childhood sweetheart.

“God’s Step Children” is one of the most intensely conflicted and ambivalent films you will ever see. On the one hand, Micheaux can’t seem to resist punishing his rebellious, unhappy but ultimately self-sacrificing heroine for her chronic impropriety, yet you feel that on some level, possibly unconscious, he identifies with her. On the other, he’s so severe--and generalizing--in castigating those blacks who do not share his aspirations, he verges on a kind of self-hating racism.

Information: (310) 822-3006.