GREAT FILMS: Within Our Gates (1919)

GREAT FILMS: WITHIN OUR GATES (1919)
Written and Directed by Oscar Micheaux

In the absence of any interesting new releases, I will instead add another piece to my 'Great Films' series.

1919 was a precocious time in cinema. For a decade, filmmakers had realized the art that could be made with this medium, but it wouldn't be for another few decades that film's true golden age would arrive. Films were still silent, and dominated by giants the like of D.W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin. Amidst it all, a young African American filmmaker named Oscar Micheaux was whittling away on independent features that would go on to have huge audiences, despite little to no distribution. The most cherished and preserved of all the films he made is Within Our Gates.

Thought for decades to have completely disappeared, the original film prints of Within Our Gates were found in remarkable condition in Madrid around the early 1990's. The film has survived through decades of edits and censors (in fact, in the only version we have today, there is a scene still missing, which is explained on an intertitle), and stands today as one of the first American movies to directly deal with the issues that challenged African Americans in the early Twentieth Century.

Starring an all black cast (the fashion those days was to cast whites in blackface), the film's main character is Sylvia. A mulatto, Sylvia (famous performer Evelyn Preer) was raised by her adoptive black parents, and educated thoroughly. As an adult, she lives in the North where she tries to help other negroes get educated as well. She's engaged to the proud Conrad (James Ruffin), and lives with her jealous cousin Alma (Flo Clements). Alma, in love with Conrad, poisons him against Sylvia by showing him Sylvia's encounter with a white man. This encounter is never fully explained till the end of the film, but it sends Conrad into a rage, and he leaves Sylvia.

Another sub-plot within the film deals with Sylvia attempting to raise money to help keep the negroe school she works at open. She asks a kindly older white woman, who plans to give her the money, until a friend of hers try to convince her not to. Planning to donate a thousand dollars, the ignorance and blatant racism of her friend convinces her that she should in fact donate $50,000, to make up for her friend's impertinance. Also, we have the story of Jasper (William Stark), a gambling gangster, who has a romantic interest in Sylvia. When Sylvia falls for Dr. V. Vivian (Charles Lucas), Jasper warns her that he'll expose her past if she doesn't choose to be with him.

Of coarse, a lot of the plot revolves around Sylvia's past and her strange encounters, that are never fully explained until the film's third act. In an act of surprising humanity, Alma takes Dr. Vivian aside, to explain Sylvia's story. Sylvia was raised two sweet parents, but when the father is mistakenly charged with the murder of a white man, both he and Sylvia's mother are arrested and lynched. Sylvia, trying to escape, is encountered by an older white man who intends to rape her. His intentions are ceased when he sees a birthmark over Sylvia's breast. This is the same birthmark that belongs to his daughter, whom he had with a black girl he'd raped. This distinguished white man had provided for Sylvia's education and life.

The film was never widely seen across America, mostly because of its provocative material which was coinciding with the 1919 Race Riots in Chicago. But still, the film had a popular following in the African American community, particularly out West, where many blacks traveled to escape the prejudices of the East. From the beginning, the film faced heavy censorship. Before its premiere, two reels were cut from the film, and both the rape and lynching scenes were both increasingly cut. Even the surviving version we see now is said to be only a partial treatment to Micheaux's original vision.

Many parallels between the attempted rape scene in this film, and the attempted rape scene in D.W. Griffith's immortal epic The Birth of a Nation (1915). That film, probably the most popular film ever made up to that point, had a young white girl being chased by the sexual misgivings of a mongoloid black man until she is forced to throw herself off a cliff, to avoid (as Griffith put it, "a fate worse than death"). Griffith spent a lot of his career trying to apologize for racism of Nation, despite the fact that it was a huge hit. But with Within Our Gates, Micheaux stated that he wanted to make it clear "who raped who".

In the end, their is more to Within Our Gates than challenging the principles of Griffith (just as there is more to Nation than unadulterated prejudice), but its unflinching stance on the state of African Americans in 1919 America makes it a true classic in cinema. It's nearly 70-year hiatus from relevancy has made it forgotten in many minds, but it (along with others of Micheaux's work) has been brought back into the social consciousness. The films final scene, between Dr. Vivien and Sylvia, is probably its most powerful. Vivien, coming back to her despite knowing her tortured past, exclaims to her "You must be proud of your country. We were not immigrants." This blatant patriotism is both powerful and enrapturing, as we see a man who refuses to think of himself as anything other than a human being.