Within Our Gates

A funny thing about being an English teacher is that some people assume you’ve read everything. They’ll ask you about Moby Dick, The Grapes of Wrath, The Shining, and 50 Shades of Gray all in the same breath, figuring you have detailed thoughts on all of them even though you may not have read any them. (For the record, I have read two of those books – not saying which.) It’s the same with film. I’m a movie guy, so people assume I’ve seen all ten hours of The Decalogue as well as all eleven Friday the 13^th films. (Spoiler: I haven’t seen all of either.)

But I want to see more and be a more informed movie viewer, so this summer, I plan to watch a different film each week that I should have seen by now but haven’t. I’ll go through the decades, starting with the teens, and watch either a significant classic I’ve neglected to this point or an important but more obscure film that I’ve always wanted to see. Maybe the movies will turn out to be new favorites and I will kick myself for missing out all this time and maybe some weeks I’ll just nod and say, “Well, I guess I can scratch that off the list and never watch it again.”

This week, I begin with the earliest of the early: Oscar Micheaux’s important but nearly forgotten 1919 race film Within Our Gates. It’s a shame Micheaux isn’t more well-known because he was a film pioneer of the first order. Born the son of a slave in 1884, he ended up founding the Micheaux Film and Book Company in Chicago, one of the first and certainly the most successful production company owned and operated by an African American until Tyler Perry came along almost a century later. Micheaux wrote, produced, and directed more than forty films over the course of his career, several of them based on his own novels.

Produced in 1919 but released in 1920, Within Our Gates is set during the Jim Crow era and addresses the black experience in America at the time. It’s the story of Sylvia Landry, a young African American woman and her efforts to both find love and raise money for the Piney Woods School, an underfunded rural school for black children. The story in some ways is very typical of silent era drama – there’s melodrama and stageyness, lost love, murder, mistaken identities, chance meetings, the saving of a child about to be run down by a car, and a wedding at the end. Despite its period hokeyness, it takes seriously the world black Americans faced. It deals with the disparities in educational opportunities and legal inequity, social and class difference, and even the contrast between country and city life.  In revealing Sylvia’s backstory, the Ku Klux Klan attacks and lynches her parents and attempt to murder her brother. Sylvia herself is also nearly raped by what turns out to be her white biological father.

There are a couple of versions of Within Our Gates available on Youtube. The clearest version is from the Library of Congress, but unfortunately, it really is silent and doesn’t feature any music, which can make the film’s 80 minute run time seem a little long. While of course it’s going to seem old fashioned to a 21^st century viewer, I’m glad I saw it. Thanks to Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther and Ava Duvernay’s A Wrinkle in Time, this past year has been a historic one for black filmmakers, but it’s important to know that back before there was even a centralized fimmaking world or a Hollywood as we understand it now, Oscar Micheaux was running his own company, making his own films, and representing the black American experience on the silver screen.