SOURCE: "Micheaux: Celebrating Blackness," in Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 25, No. 2, Summer, 1991, pp. 351-60.

Hooks is a major contemporary feminist and Afrocentric literary critic. In the following essay, she discusses the ways in which Micheaux's films "work to transgress boundaries, offering perspectives, 'takes, ' on black experience that can be found/seen in no other cinematic practice during his day. " Specifically, she examines the depiction of sexuality in the film Ten Minutes to Live.

Conceiving of his work in independent filmmaking as counter-hegemonic cultural production, Oscar Micheaux worked doggedly to create screen images that would disrupt and challenge conventional racist representations of blackness:

I have always tried to make my photoplays present the truth, to lay before the race a cross section of its own life, to view the colored heart from close range. My results might have been narrow at times, due perhaps to certain limited situations...