In the late 1950s, Melvin Van Peebles was gripping cables on a San Francisco cable car with zero technical knowledge of filmmaking. A few years later he was celebrated in Paris as a French film director, and soon after he sparked a revolution in American cinema. This episode maps his relentless reinvention, from a literature degree at Ohio Wesleyan and years as an Air Force flight navigator, to the photo essay The Big Heart, to three short films made without knowing about work prints, frame rates, or separate sound recording. When Hollywood refused even to let him apprentice, he left for the Netherlands and then France, where the Cinémathèque Française had discovered his raw shorts.

We explain how he learned literary French, wrote for the satirical magazine Hara-Kiri, and published novels specifically to exploit a legal loophole letting aut ...