Body and Soul, featuring Jasiri X & Paul Robeson

The Hollywood Theater and 1Hood Media are proud to announce an exciting new project funded through a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.  On Friday, June 17, 2016, hip-hop artist and community activist Jasiri X will premiere his original new score for the newly restored Body and Soul, the 1925 silent film directed by Oscar Micheaux and starring the great Paul Robeson.

 

Oscar Micheaux was the first major African-American feature filmmaker, and produced more than 44 films during the silent cinema era through the mid-1950s. Many of his films were open, blunt and thought-provoking regarding certain racial issues of that time. Body and Soul, perhaps his best known film, is a direct critique of the corruption and dishonesty among the clergy of his day.  He cast singer, actor and activist Paul Robeson in his film debut in dual roles as an escaped convict posing as the minister of a Southern black church, and as the convict's upstanding brother.  Made by a black filmmaker for black audiences, the film has an almost entirely all-black cast and crew.  

Paul Robeson was the son of a minister who had been an escaped slave, had attended Rutgers University, and distinguished himself on the concert stage. Robeson appeared at the request of Eugene O'Neill in his plays All God's Chillun Got Wings and The Emperor Jones, also starring in the 1933 film version of the latter work. He made a handful of other films, notably singing "Ol' Man River" in Show Boat (1936), but his leftist political views aroused great controversy, and he made his final movie appearance in Tales of Manhattan (1942). He continued his concert career in Europe through the 1960s and has become an outstanding symbol of black consciousness and pride.