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Within Our Gates (1920 - silent) |
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Within Our Gates
Evelyn Preer stars as Sylvia Landry, an African American Southerner who travels North to Boston to secure white benefactors for an ailing school for Black children.
This is the earliest extant feature directed by an African-American. It follows, in flashback, the Southern heroine Sylvia Landry as she loses her surrogate family to a white lynching mob, is raped by a powerful white man, and journeys North to seek sponsorship of a school for Black children. Written, produced and directed by Oscar Micheaux; with Evelyn Preer, Flo Clements, Grant Gorman, James D. Ruffin, William Stark, Mattie Edwards, Ralph Johnson, E.G. Tatum, Jack Chenault, William Smith, Bernice Ladd, Grant Edwards. Screenplay: Oscar Micheaux.. A young black schoolteacher from the South journeys north to raise money for her school and runs smack into Soap Opera Central, with a bewildering parade of love triangles, gangsters on the lam, scandalous secrets, and more marriage proposals than you can shake a bouquet at. It seems that Micheaux went to great pains to insure that he mixed in every single melodrama clich invented since Homer. And on top of that, he stirred in social issues so volatile that when the film was released in 1920, community leaders both black and white denounced it as an incitement to violence. The film looks at Negro education & voting rights, snobbish racism, interracial marriage, blacks preying on blacks, blacks betraying their own birthright, and if that's not enough, it features a rather unpleasant enactment of a mob lynching. But most surprising of all, the film ends with a plea for black patriotism -- the film shows that not all whites are evil and not all blacks are good, and argues that blacks should love their country, not hate it, and should fight to make it a better place for their people.
Made just four years after The Birth of a Nation, Within Our Gates is both an unflinching portrayal of the gross violations perpetrated by whites against blacks, and a determined call for black idealism. Repeatedly recut by censors who deemed the harrowing sequences of lynching and rape too incendiary in the wake of the Chicago race riots of 1919, few saw Micheauxs film as he intended it. Lost for 70 years, Within Our Gates was rediscovered at the Filmoteca Espanola in Madrid and restored by The Library of Congress in 1993. A powerful and enlightening cultural document, Within Our Gates is no less relevant today than it was in 1919. Dont miss this rare screening of a landmark film by American visionary Oscar Micheaux.
Sylvia's mother and father, from the beginning of "Sylvia's Story"Alma's account of the Landry family.
Gridlestone's murder.
Efrem's lynching.
The murder of the Landry family.
Placing kindling around the lynching posts used for the Landry family.
Armand Gridlestone attempts to rape Sylvia Landry.
Dr. Vivian and Sylvia talk about loyalty and pride near the end of Within Our Gates.
One of Dr. Vivian's final remarks to Sylvia in Within Our Gates.
The film's happy ending. Dr. Vivian and Sylvia Landry united.
End frame of Within Our Gates.
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