The Symbol of the Unconquered

In preparation of reviewing a month of African-American films for Black History Month in chronological order (whenever possible), I looked up Google Video for the earliest available movie from the Negro pioneer, Oscar Micheaux. The Symbol of the Unconquered: A Story of the Ku Klux Klan was what I found on YouTube. It wasn't under that heading but that of the William Hooker Quartet whose members are Hooker on drums, Okkyung Lee on cello, Ras Moshe on saxophone and flute, and Sabir Matteen on sax also. The drums dominated the underscore to the first 20 minutes before all the other instruments came into play. I thought that score was pretty compelling for the story presented on the screen with the band being visually dissolved during the inter-titles. The plot itself, about a racist group-one of whom is a mulatto who hates blacks with a passion-that tries to scare a black owner, named Van Allen, of a valuable property off was something that had to be addressed after D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation. Too bad that scene of the Klan being defeated by another black man throwing bricks at them is currently lost as that would have made it a very exciting picture indeed. As it is, there's still the mulatto woman, Eve, whose happy ending with Van Allen is all but assured after things are cleared up that provides some fascination with the way Micheaux seems to like to present a light-skinned woman as more worthy of the hero than one with more darker skin or maybe I'm reading too much into the plot line. Worth a look once for anyone curious about the earliest days of the cinema.

THE SYMBOL OF THE UNCONQUERED (1920) is one of the earliest surviving silent films to prominently feature a black cast, and is directed by Oscar Micheaux. It tells the story of Eve Mason (Iris Hall), a woman from the south who inherits property from her grandfather and journeys to settle there. Along the way, after being forced to stay in a barn by a light-skinned black, Jefferson Driscoll (Lawrence Chenault) who hates his race and tries to pass for white, she encounters Hugh Van Allen (Walter Thompson), a neighbor who owns property which turns out to be very valuable. When Driscoll and his white friends learn of the value of Van Allen's property, they plot against him in order to force him to sell - or suffer the consequences...

SCRIPT: As with Micheaux's previous feature WITHIN OUR GATES, the narrative rambles and is crowded with too many characters to make a definite impression. The central themes deal with a black woman trying to find a place for herself in a hostile world, and a biracial man who harbors resentment against his own race for supposedly hampering his progress in society. (A flashback shows why – Driscoll's mother unwittingly interferes with his attempts to court a white girl, and he reacts by throwing his mother to the ground.) Interesting themes, but unfortunately the narrative sags fatally in the middle with rather uninteresting plotting by the villains, and by the time the climax comes along, it's too late to really perk things up. There's also really very little character definition – nobody seems like anything more than a character type here. SCORE: 5.5/10

ACTING: The acting is adequate here for the most part, but since there are so many characters to keep track of, I can't say that I felt any of the performances really stood out. There is some melodramatic behavior and mugging early on, and some of the scenes are unintentionally funny as a result. Iris Hall is charming as the heroine, but she doesn't really get enough screen time to do much with her role. Chenault is a bit broad but mostly effective as the villainous Driscoll. SCORE: 6/10

CINEMATOGRAPHY/PRODUCTION: The camera-work is fairly competent here, with some interesting and evocative shots of the night sky, as well as a few menacing shots of the KKK ride at night. The editing is a little clumsy at times. There could be a bit more variety in long, medium, and close- up shots, though. It would help to maintain interest. SCORE: 6/10

SUMMARY: THE SYMBOL OF THE UNCONQUERED does have an intriguing premise, and one has to commend Micheaux for being willing to bring such uncompromising material to the screen. The narrative is uneven and the acting is adequate, but there's not much chance for anyone to make an impression. Still, the movie does have historical importance as an early example of films that address the issues of black life in the early 20th century. SCORE: 6/10

After "Within Our Gates" (1920), the second of Oscar Micheaux's three surviving silent films (that I know of as of this writing), "The Symbol of the Unconquered" is another, along with the prior picture, strong rebuttal to D.W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation" (1915), as well as a reflection of the Great Migration in the United States and a revision of the melodrama and Western genres. Griffith's ahistorical and racist Civil War and Reconstruction-era epic is probably the most influential film ever made, including being largely responsible for the creation of the second KKK. It also galvanized African Americans into action, including the then-nascent NAACP, which protested the film, and Micheaux, who took to filmmaking to correct such screen misrepresentations of race, sex, and the Klan. Not the heroes Griffith depicted, the night riders are terrorists behind a system of corruption and racism.

Unfortunately, little more than half of the original film appears to exist now, including the surviving print missing its climax and with the restoration only providing a brief synopsis from a contemporary review to give us an idea of what happened in it. We see what leads up to and what the resolution is of the attack from the Klan on a black prospector in an effort to steal his land, but we're missing the confrontation itself. It makes it difficult to evaluate the picture aesthetically, without the payoff, just as the heightened crosscutting was escalating the tension--contrasting torch-lit nighttime cinematography of the Klan with daytime (and perhaps originally tinted day-for-night) images of the female heroine mounting her own horse to organize a rescue effort for her prospector neighbor. The anti-racist intent of racial uplift of the film remains clear, though, and given the financial and technical limitations (the day lighting of some of the supposed night scenes here in particular) accessible to the African-American filmmaker Micheaux, the extreme censorship and other difficulties in distribution his films faced and the fact of the poor treatment of nitrate prints for most of the afterlife of the silent film era, it's fortunate the much of the film still exists at all. Most of his silent films--most silent films in general--don't.

In addition to recasting the Klan as the villainous and multi-racial "Knights of the Black Cross," Micheaux also focuses a lot on relations between lighter and darker-skinned African Americans. The dilemma of the central romance hinges on the man not knowing that the woman he loves is also black and her not knowing that she's sometimes "passing" as white. "The melodramatic trope of someone being other than what he or she seems," as Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence put it in their essay "Oscar Micheaux's The Symbol of the Unconquered: Text and Context," and given that melodrama was the genre both Griffith and Micheaux tended to work in, the effectiveness of the melodrama (as Dan Florey begins to get at in the essay "Race, Rationality, and Melodrama: Aesthetic Response and the Case of Oscar Micheaux") was paramount to Micheaux's recasting of the cinematic representation of race, sex, or the Klan.

Additionally, the Western genre plays interestingly into the Great Migration narrative of the film, which is set in the Northwest, the heroine having moved their from the South to inherit her grandfather's land. The prospector hero, Van Allen, is ruggedly self-sufficient and courteous to a good woman as typical of Western heroes. Adding to the racial difference from mainstream entries in the genre, it's the heroine, Eve Mason, dressed in full cowgirl regalia and riding a horse as it bucks, who comes to rescue the man as his property is threatened by unscrupulous bandits.

Perhaps even more intriguing, the main villain hates his own race, including his black mother, who once ruined his courtship of a white woman by her presence exposing his racial heritage, as he intentionally tries to cross the color line. That Lawrence Chenault portrays such a complicated antagonist makes "The Symbol of the Unconquered" all the more compelling. This reconfiguration of the "mulatto" characters, the good woman and the bad man, is in stark contrast to Griffith's simplistic and racist depiction of their villainy as an innate consequence of miscegenation. It's the locus of Griffith's racial and sexual paranoia, of black men having sex (but always considered rape by Griffith and his ilk) with white women. For Micheaux's mulatto, it's also sexual, but may be a consequence of the interracial relationship being denied rather than the other way around. That the role of Chenault's Driscoll's mother is cast as the proof of his race and, perhaps, a suggestion of the history of white men raping black women also hints at this reversal of Griffith's characterization. Micheaux, after all, did much the same in the more-complete extant print of "Within Our Gates." Another great scene here of Driscoll forced to confront his own race occurs in a through-the-mirror shot as he sees the proudly black Van Allen behind him before they fight over stolen horses.

J. Ronald Green (in the book "With a Crooked Stick -- The Films of Oscar Micheaux") also points out that the early scene of Eve's escape into a storm as recalling Lillian Gish in Griffith's "Way Down East" (1920). Although now an incomplete film, what remains of "The Symbol of the Unconquered"--its use of melodrama and the Western to counteract Griffith's cinematic misrepresentations, to portray good and evil as not based on race, heroes and those to be rescued as not based on sex, and to offer positive portrayals of race men and women for social uplift--is enough to prove its greatness beside Micheaux's two other surviving silent films, "Within Our Gates" and "Body and Soul" (1925).

This film is a product of its time period, and may be criticized as being a little creaky or lacking in artistry. On the other hand, all great art has honesty and truth to it, and this one certainly has that, and is also deeply meaningful. Some of the Klan footage and climactic moments are unfortunately lost, but what remains is fantastic. This is the real Klan: hooded riders streaming through the night with torches lit, on their way to carry out their threats of whipping a man and burning his home to the ground because he won't sell the valuable land that it's on. It's a group of terrorists.

Director Oscar Micheaux made the most of a low budget, and his story telling is quite good, switching back and forth between characters and keeping up a good pace. The scenes between Iris Hall and Walker Allen, who become unexpected neighbors when her character sets out to claim inherited land, are not a sweeping romance, but they're strong nonetheless. Him finding her in the woods standing disconsolate before a tree, her dreaming of him in the night, and the two of them in each other's arms, confronting another aspect of race - these are all very nice moments.

Perhaps more importantly, I loved how the film was not one-dimensional, and broached the topic of racism within the community. A man of mixed-race who has passed for white in the film is especially hard on black people regardless of how light-skinned they are, instead of being sympathetic to them. It's like he's made it into the 'club' and wants to make sure no one else does. In this I see some of the brutal honesty Micheaux showed us with some of the characters in 'Within Our Gates,' and also just how arbitrary and ridiculous racism is. If your skin tone is a few shades too dark or you're otherwise detected for black, you're a lower form of being. You sleep in the barn, and you best stay in line or else the Klan may descend upon you.

I see this as an important, powerful film, particularly if you can see it through the lens of a minority at the time it was made. It's sad to me that's average rating as of this writing (3.1 Letterboxd, 5.7 IMDb), is on a par with 'The Birth of a Nation' (2.6 Letterboxd, 6.4 IMDb), even if one factors in Lillian Gish, the production value of a big studio, and the considerably higher budget ($110,000 vs. shoestring) for the latter.

Symbol of the Unconquered, The (1920)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Strange film from the black independent director Oscar Micheaux. A light skinned black woman travels North to get her inheritance that her grandfather left her. In this new town she meets another black man who hates his race and pretends to be wife, an evil Indian and eventually the KKK. The director apparently started making these "black films" in response to how blacks were being shown at the time so on a historical level this film is pretty interesting but as a film it really never takes off. The stereotypes are pretty out there and laughable and the film is way too over-dramatic in every single scene. The film was originally promoted to black people claiming that the KKK would be massacred in the film. That happens but sadly this scene is lost so we're not able to view it today. I guess you could call this one of the first "blaxploitation" films, although the director never makes all the whites bad and all the blacks good. It's rather interesting seeing his hatred towards certain members of his own race. Another down note is the horrible music score added to the film. Again, for film history sake this is a must see but on its own there's really nothing too special here. I also recorded the director's Within the Gates and Body and Soul, which are apparently better.