WITHIN OUR GATES (1920)

Country: U.S.A.

Genre(s): Drama

Director: Oscar Micheaux

Cast: Evelyn Preer / Flo Clements / Charles Lucas

Plot

Coming to the North from the segregated rural south, an African American woman looks for funding for a Southern school for black children.

What I Liked

When one considers that “Within Our Gates” is the oldest surviving example of a feature-length film directed by an African American, it should come as no surprise that the entire movie is a condemnation of Jim Crow America.  In fact, one could see it as the direct antithesis of D.W. Griffith’s more renowned epic “The Birth of a Nation,” released to great acclaim just five years earlier.  Where Griffith’s movie portrayed black people as slovenly, traitorous, lecherous buffoons and the Ku Klux Klan as heroic enforcers of peace and order, director Oscar Micheaux and the cast of “Within Our Gates” go to great lengths to dispel such misconceptions.  To his credit, Micheaux does not play into the same racist hatemongering of Griffith by portraying all whites as idiots and savages, but rather take a peacemaker’s approach to race by presenting race as a more complex issue than the simpleton’s view found in “The Birth of a Nation.”

The film’s portrayal of race issues in 1920 is the most interesting aspect of “Within Our Gates” for a viewer separated from the time by almost a century.  Clearly the intention of Micheaux was to display the various facets of American life that racial injustice effects as well as the wide variety of people, black and white, involved.  From the bowing and scraping of the “Uncle Tom” preachers and house negros, to the wealthy old white women, to black intellectuals, to ignorant hillbillies, to street hustlers, to poor black sharecroppers, to white landowners, each plays a role in or is effected by the struggle of blacks for equality in modern America.  Amazingly, the film uses this wide variety of characters to take on an even wider (and shocking for 1920) variety of topics: religion, poverty, sharecropping, miscegenation, education, crime, patriotism, lynching, rape, and incest.

What I Disliked

Unfortunately, outside of its historic relevance as a portrait of its times, “Within our Gates” has little to hold the modern viewer’s attention.  It is a silent film, and a low budget one at that.  The surviving picture is so faded that at times its impossible to make out what is happening on screen.  Not that if you could see what was happening, you would understand the events any better.  Micheaux’s insistence on showing racism from so many perspectives seems to have gotten in the way of his creating a coherent and enjoyable movie.  The plot structure is peppered with frame stories, dream sequences, and flashbacks, further disorienting the viewer by making it difficult to keep track of where in the overall timeline of events the action on screen is taking place.  When the action taking place involves the not-so-riveting account of someone searching for school funding, we're not exactly talking about edge-of-your-seat excitement here to begin with.  Ultimately, though this film lasts only one hour and seventeen minutes, it took me four sittings to get through.

Most Memorable Scene

When watching the scene depicting the lynching of a black man wrongly accused of killing a wealthy white landowner (the condemned man’s wife, whose only crime was apparently fleeing with her husband and, of course, being black, is also lynched) I assumed that scene would end up as the most memorable scene when it came time to write this entry.  However the lynching is followed immediately by an attempted interracial rape which ultimately turns out to be incestuous.  The pair of actors do a fine job here of depicting all the brutality, fear, and desperation involved in such a moment.  Nearly a hundred years later it still makes for a visceral and disturbing scene and is easily the most reproving of the film's many condemnations of the horrors of racism.

My Rating: 2 out of 5