Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on MUBI. Oscar Micheaux's Within Our Gates is showing June 17 - July 17, 2020.
Oscar Micheaux has been hailed as many things: The first Black auteur, a modernist “Czar of Black Hollywood,” and a pioneering independent director whose distinctive style forged new ways of telling stories about the complexities of the Black experience. He was also—quite literally—a pioneer. Born in 1884 as the fifth child of former slaves, Micheaux moved to Chicago as a teenager, where he worked in stockyards and steel mills before setting up a series of small businesses. He lived an itinerant life as a Pullman porter, saving enough money to buy a plot of land in South Dakota. There he set up a thriving homestead, where he lived off the prairie land and wrote novels. Droughts and the break-up of his marriage brought an end to this chapter, but Micheaux’s homesteading experiences fed prominently into his writing—with novels like The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer (1913) and The Homesteader (1917) —and his later filmmaking, informing a vision of independence and self-sufficiency. The popularity of his novel, The Homesteader, also introduced him to the film industry. When a series of negotiations to adapt the novel into a feature film turned sour, Micheaux took matters into his own hands. He founded the Micheaux Film and Book Company and produced the (now sadly lost) debut feature on his own, going on to direct over forty independent films in his lifetime. The founding father of African-American indie cinema had arrived.
Within Our Gates was Micheaux’s second feature. This urgent 1919 melodrama—the oldest surviving feature by an African American director—tells a complex and many-layered story of love, racial uplift, and racist violence. Released soon after the so-called “Red Summer” of racial confrontations and uprisings that spread throughout the U.S. in 1919, its frank portrayal of lynchings, systemic racism, and the attempted rape of a Black woman ran up against problems with the censors. As Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence point out in Writing Himself into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films, and His Audiences (2000), the Chicago censor board briefly banned the film, fearing it would incite another “race riot,” and scenes were later cut and re-edited. Within Our Gates opens with a provocation. Placing us in the center of the drama, the opening title card informs us that 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.“ Migration to the North offered many African Americans the chance to flee the extreme racial violence of the South and start a new life. Micheaux boldly begins by pointing out that this is far from true. Within Our Gates goes on to depict—in a complex final flashback sequence that fills in the central protagonist’s back story—the shocking violence being inflicted by White racists.
The film’s varied cast of characters, its restless movement between locations, and a tendency to veer off-piste from the central storyline to bring in parallel subplots make Within Our Gates sometimes hard to follow. The ingredients of a melodrama are there—a love triangle, a thwarted engagement, a telegram snatched by a love-sick, meddling cousin—but the film seems headed in a different direction to where it finally ends up. Micheaux does not stick to a single genre but hops between them: borrowing from the gangster film, the melodrama, and the romance, but parsing it through an authentic, almost documentary eye to the details of contemporary Black life. Shooting on-location—in people's houses, on streets, in parks—rather than film sets brings to the screen forgotten spaces and communities: forgotten only because mainstream cinema has conveniently chosen to ignore them.
Seen as a sharp rebuttal to D.W. Griffith’s grossly bigoted and bloated epic The Birth of a Nation (1915), Within Our Gates explicitly confronts, and often subverts, the African-American stereotypes that were circulating widely in the media of the time: in part, by offering more diverse and wide-ranging representations. The central protagonist, Sylvia Landry—played by Evelyn Peer, the Black community's “First Lady of the Screen,” and who began her career in Micheaux's The Homesteader—is selflessly devoted to uplifting her community through education. Sylvia embodies many of the qualities elevated by the “New Negro Renaissance,” with an early intertitle stating that she is “typical of the intelligent Negro of our times.” But not every Black character is similarly portrayed as aspirational or a beacon of their community. The world of Within Our Gates is populated with crooks and professional gamblers, as well as Black characters who betray their community by either conspiring with White people or peddling false promises. The figure of Old Ned the preacher is Micheaux’s bitter, biting critique of a religion that has failing to support its Black community. These negative representations clearly proved controversial, drawing critique from certain Black reformists who wanted positive figures that would instill African-American pride. As bell hooks writes in “Micheaux: Celebrating Blackness” (1991), although Micheaux wanted to “challenge white supremacist representations of ‘blackness,’ he was not concerned with the simple reduction of black representation to a ‘positive’ image.” Within Our Gates lays out a vivid, often messy tapestry of the complexities of the Black experience from within. At the forefront of the movement of “race films,” Micheaux powerfully presents Black culture with multiple ways of being—and being portrayed—outside of the strictures of the commercial film industry and right in the midst of the era of segregation.
Although dismissed in some quarters for his supposedly amateurish approach to the grammar of filmmaking, Micheaux clearly forged a distinctive and idiosyncratic style that cannot simply be dismissed as the product of limited resources and prolific output. Several writers have explored how he bypasses some of the established techniques of traditional continuity editing, while still maintaining narrative coherence. Within Our Gates has an unusual structure: It’s not really linear but makes unusual yet lively detours into the lives of other characters. These digressions sometimes appear as memories, other times as narrative flashbacks: either way, they don’t simply move the plot forward but instead flesh out the characters’ emotions and inner lives, visualizing experiences that are difficult to voice. Enclosed in these fluctuating memories and formative flashbacks, feelings of guilt, pain, remorse, and trauma bubble up through the film, giving evidence for their aliveness in the lived experiences of the characters. As Dina Ciraulo argues in “Narrative Style in Oscar Micheaux's Within Our Gates” (1998), these digressions are as much a part of the film as its (often-convoluted) storyline: the real story does not lie in the outward action but in the “subplot, the interior emotive life of a character.” Ciraulo goes on to write that: “Micheaux shows that historical events are not contained to a dead past, but continue to live in the thoughts, dreams and memories of a people.” These interlocking histories, multi-layered subplots, and potent memories form the teeming social fabric of the film: where the pain, the horrors, and the hopes of the past filter through into the present.