Pearl Bowser (1931-2023) was an award-winning author, television director, film director, producer, and film archivist. She was the author of a book on the first 10 years of the career of Oscar Micheaux, an African-American who directed 40 "race pictures" between 1918 and 1940. She's thus credited for having helped rediscover some of Oscar Micheaux's rare surviving films. She was the founder of African Diaspora Images, a collection of visual and oral histories that documents the history of African-American filmmaking. Part of her journey included teaching young people film in the 1960s and 1970s. Though Bowser initially set out to research the role of Black women in early African-American filmmaking, she eventually studied both genders because too few Black women were among the earliest African-American filmmakers. Bowser stumbled upon her career in film when a friend, documentary filmmaker Ricky Leacock, asked her to work in his office where she helped out with billing and ordering equipment. She was the director of the Theater Project at Third World Newsreel, the largest distributor of independent film by people of color in the United States, from 1978 to 1987.
Bowser made a few films herself, including Midnight Ramble, a documentary she made with Bestor Cram for the PBS series “The American Experience” about “race movies,” as films made by Micheaux and others for Black audiences were called. In the late 1960s Bowser also wrote a newspaper cooking column. In 1970, with Joan Eckstein, she published her best recipes in a book, A Pinch of Soul.
“Pearl didn’t just revive Micheaux’s legacy; she helped preserve and shape the narrative of independent Black film,” Ina Archer, media conservation and digitization specialist at the Smithsonian museum, told the New York Times. “Across her five-decade career she wove a continuous thread through a century of Black film that is only just now beginning to come into focus.”
In 2012, she donated her collection of hundreds of films, video, and audio tapes she had amassed to the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian Institution.
The book she worked on at MacDowell with collaborator Louise Spence, Writing Himself into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films, and His Audiences, won the Theatre Library Association's first prize for outstanding book on recorded performance; the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation's first prize for outstanding book in moving image history and culture; and was a finalist for the Katherine Singer Kovacs award.
