Women’s History Month - “TrailblazeHers"

The Godmother of Black Independent Cinema

Pearl Bowser was a film historian, curator and collector who was instrumental in preserving and bringing to light the works of Black filmmakers from early in the last century, especially those of Oscar Micheaux who has been described as “the Jackie Robinson of American film.”

She was born Pearl Johnson on June 25th, 1931, in Harlem, New York, where she became a devoted moviegoer throughout her youth. She excelled academically and was awarded a scholarship to Brooklyn College. She joined an interracial club in the Bronx known as the Paul Robeson Club, and married fellow civil rights activist LeRoy Bowser in 1955.

Ms. Bowser developed an interest in the forgotten works of early Black filmmakers in the 1960s when, while working as a researcher on a colleague’s idea for a book about Micheaux, she traveled to California from New York to interview aging actors who had been in movies made by Micheaux decades earlier.

She began hunting down and collecting movies by Micheaux and other Black filmmakers from the early decades of the 1900s — works that were, for that period, triumphs of independent filmmaking, since they were generally made on shoestring budgets and sometimes dealt with topics that mainstream movies would not touch. Micheaux’s “The Symbol of the Unconquered” (1920), for instance, was an indictment of the Ku Klux Klan.

Those films also serve as historical documents, depicting Black communities in ways not seen in mainstream movies of the time.

In 1970, Ms. Bowser joined Mel Roman and Charles Hobson in researching and curating the enormously influential “The Black Film” retrospective at the Jewish Museum. The following year, she began teaching seminars on African-American film at libraries, museums and universities.

Ms. Bowser organized both her own first film festival, the Black Film History Series, and the nation’s first American women’s film festival in New York City in 1979 alone. At the same time, she served as the director of the Theater Project at Third World Newsreel, the largest U.S. distributor of independent film by people of color, from 1978 to 1987. 

Icon, scholar, TrailblazeHer!

Sources and for more info:

 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/26/movies/pearl-bowser-dead.html

https://www.rogerebert.com/tributes/remembering-pearl-bowser-1931-2023-godmother-of-black-independent-cinema

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