Within Our Gates

Within Our Gates (1920)

Runtime: 79 minutes

Directed by: Oscar Micheaux

Starring: Evelyn Preer, Flo Clements, James D. Ruffin, Jack Chenault, William Smith

From: Micheaux Book & Film Company

This is a movie that is rather random; I rarely talk about silent films here. I have watched some in the past but that was mostly before I started doing the blog here on Blogspot, let alone Letterboxd. This was on Turner Classic Movies late last night and as it has quite the backstory I figured it was worth talking about. The (verbatim, by the way) plot description from IMDb, then the Letterboxd review. Note that the controversial word in the IMDb synopsis is actually in the film frequently.

“Abandoned by her fiancé, an educated negro woman with a shocking past dedicates herself to helping a near bankrupt school for impoverished negro youths.”

I realize that I rarely talk about silent films here. Believe me I've seen some in my life; it's just that it's been in the past long before I had a profile here and I suppose that to be even more varied than I already am I should see one at least once in a blue moon. This was on Turner Classic Movies and it has quite the backstory and I am glad I saw it despite giving it an average rating.

This is the earliest movie from an African-American director known to still exist. It's known as a “race film”, an old genre where movies with African-American casts played exclusively for that audience. Many of those films unfortunately vanished and that seemed to be the fate of this motion picture... until an almost complete version was found in Spain. They had to modify it as close to the original as they could but that's what they did and that is how the movie can be seen today. As many of the race films were actually from white directors/white studios, Oscar Micheaux doing it on his own is significant.

As for the movie itself, I honestly have to rate it as average overall. The way it tells its story of a woman trying to raise money for a small impoverished school and the story itself was rather confused at times and told in an odd way. I don't know if that would have been better in the original print or not, but we'll never know now. At least it was still interesting to see how life was back then for that segment of the audience and the idea of some black people “selling out their own race” to try and befriend whites was real intriguing.

A word of warning: there's a scene involving lynching and yeah, it's still disturbing in 2014. Unfortunately that feeling and theme is still relevant in today's culture, with what happened in Ferguson, Missouri and other examples of overzealous and possibly racist law enforcement officers killing innocent minorities.

I'll return tomorrow night.