Oscar Michaux

(On Cable TV, July 2019) The more I watch older movies, the more I appreciate either the time-travelling aspect of watching something created decades ago, or the various discoveries that reading about a movie can lead to. So it is that Within our Gates, already an intriguing film upon watching, becomes a fascinating gateway to learning more about “race films,” an early subgenre of cinema made for black American audiences decades before blaxploitation paved the way (or so I thought) to modern black cinema. Within our Gates is all the more remarkable in that it’s the earliest surviving film by black writer-director Oscar Michaux, that it features a mostly black cast, and that it squarely describes and confronts the racism of the times. Considering the narrative from a conventional perspective, the plot is a mess: The prologue is badly integrated, the coincidences and contrivances multiply, the ending becomes a third-act flashback that merely explains something right before the conclusion rushes by. From a cinematic perspective, the film is also limited by the conventions of silent cinema: static shots, overacting, not many refinements in terms of staging. And yet not many of those flaws actually matter once you start watching the film. In fact, some of those flaws end up strengthening it: The herky-jerky nature of the plotting means that the film has a substantial number of themes, and gets to cover many aspects of circa-1920 black experience in America, including womanly rivalry, north/south divide, urban crime, blacks undermining other blacks, the importance of education, the burden of mixed heritage and the ever-present threat of violent death at the hands of whites. It’s that last aspect that appears the most vital to contemporary viewers. The film begins with a title card nonchalantly dropping the horrifying “At the opening of our drama, we find our characters in the North, where the prejudices and hatreds of the South do not exist—though this does not prevent the occasional lynching of a Negro.” … and it ends with a white-on-black rape attempt intercut with a surprisingly explicit depiction of a lynching of innocent black characters. Within our Gates is also quite a showcase for many actors neglected by mainstream Hollywood histories, beginning with the incredibly likable Evelyn Preer, who carries the film on her shoulders as the protagonist. Historically, Preer was probably the first black actress superstar and this film has her demonstrating quite an emotional range. There’s quite a bit of clever material in Within our Gates once you see it as an intentional answer to the incredibly racist Birth of a Nation, a conscious attempt to affirm the black perspective on then-current America to some provocative editing to drive its point home. I was surprised to be taken so intensely by this film—I had recorded it on a whim and ended up discovering far more than I had expected in the process. As a pre-Code black movie, it vigorously tackles important issues in ways we wouldn’t see again until many decades later. I kept thinking that the film has a lot more to do with 2018’s Blackkklansman than most other movies in the intervening century—and that it still has a lot to teach us about why everyone should get to tell their stories through movies.