Long before Spike Lee or Mario Van Peebles, there was Oscar Micheaux. The son of freed slaves, Micheaux pioneered black cinema in states in 1919, and followed it up with an astonishing canon of 27 silent films and 16 sound features. His tales of black life used black actors to portray real situations. The Lincoln Center has commissioned a new soundtrack to his 1925 silent film ‘Body and Soul’, performed by the Center’s Jazz Orchestra under maestro Wynton Marsalis.
