Body and Soul (1925)

(On Cable TV, October 2020) My naïve understanding of black American cinema prior to digging deeper in film history was that blaxploitation had started it all, but it took until the late 1980s until black filmmakers came on the scene with their own stories. That is profoundly mistaken, and I’ve been trying to atone for this misconception by seeking out the films of Oscar Micheaux who, in the silent era, would produce films as vital and reflective of the African-American condition as anything produced later on by Spike Lee and his cohort. Within Our Gates is a terrific example of silent cinema that still has the power to shock today, and I was also impressed with The Symbol of the Unconquered as a black western with the KKK as antagonist. Body and Soul is very much in the same vein, although it turns its attention inward, focusing on a mother trying to keep her daughter from making bad decisions—even if the temptation here is a preacher who is secretly an abusive thieving murdering alcoholic. Narratively, Body and Soul is a bit of a mess—the ending is a blatant “it was all a dream” cop-out, and the film can’t quite figure out if it’s the story of the daughter, the mother, the evil preacher or his beatific twin brother. On a technical level, much of the film is as rough as any other 1920s film—static camera, rough inserts, overlong title cards and so on. But there are occasional flashes of brilliance as well: there’s a sequence in a cabin in which the antagonist comes to rape the heroine, and it’s filmed with a great deal of style, the image narrowly focusing on his shoes as he enters the cabin as a way to build suspense, and then (“Half an hour later,” the title card bluntly says) leaving the cabin with little guilt. It’s a sequence that remains with viewers long after the silliness of the plot harms the overall film. Still, Body and Soul remains a fascinating viewing experience: it features rural black characters living dignified lives decades before, say, Sounder. It’s almost entirely absent of white characters, and it shows Micheaux with greater command of his craft as a filmmaker than his first features. Perhaps more regrettably, it’s one of the few silent films from Micheaux to have survived until now—might as well appreciate what we now have.