Written and Directed by Oscar Micheaux
Starring Evelyn Preer, Floy Clements, James D. Ruffin, Jack Chenault, William Smith and Charles D. Lucas
USA, 1920
This is the oldest surviving film directed by an African-American and the first in a series of films by Oscar Micheaux I’ll be reviewing here. Oscar Micheaux was a pioneer of African-American cinema and made what people used to call “Race Films” – movies made by and for Black people. These days the term makes it sound like all Race Films were about racial issues, but in reality, while some definitely were, others were just genre movies like crime stories, adventures or westerns with Black casts. These films were made outside of the established Hollywood system, so sometimes this meant a low budgets and amateur actors, but not always. The majority of these films have been lost and the ones that weren’t were ignored by film historians for years, so today, even the ones that are technically flawed, are very important for preservation.
WITHIN OUR GATES is a silent film, and typical of films of the era, has a melodramatic plot with lots of characters intertwined in confusing relationships involving betrayal, romance, crime and hidden pasts. That’s all window dressing for the important stuff, which is the fact that this movie turns movies like BIRTH OF A NATION on their heads, rejecting the notion that Black people were the problem during the period and white mobs were the heroic answer by showing the horror of lynchings and rape.
Two particularly memorable characters include a Black preacher who encourages his own people to "know their place" and hates himself for it, and a Black servant to a white man who loves gossip so much he ends up informing on his own people to the point where they're lynched, and even though he's the informant, ends up lynched himself just because he happens to be near the lynch mob when they can't find anyone else to kill. Both represent characters who are both victims of the system and victimizers within it, illustrating just how insidious institutional racism is.
The broad strokes of the plot involve a Black woman from the south who travels north in order to raise money for a struggling school for Black children. The climax of the film is made up of the harrowing story of her past, in which her adopted parents were lynched and she narrowly escaped death only to be sexually assaulted. Despite the tragic final act, the movie ends on a note of hope as one character reminds another to remain proud of her heritage.
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