A Century of Film is an ongoing project to watch one film from each year from 1917 to present. The film from 1920 is Within Our Gates.
While I don’t intend for this project to be about racism in history, it’s a topic that is hard to avoid when you’re looking at early film. Black actors were still not allowed at the premieres of their own movies, segregation was a fact of life, and we have the looming shadow of Birth of a Nation over the entire industry, a shadow so long that invoking the film today is still an easy way to court controversy. In this case, race is going to play into this column entirely because I want to watch Within Our Gates.
This was considered something called a “race film” back when it was released in 1920, a movie that was made by and for black people in America. That did keep it out of the mainstream, and director Oscar Micheaux’s work is largely lost today, but it also gave it a weird niche at time. If you’re legally being kept out of the mainstream, and can’t even attend most films, you’re going to have to make your own art in your own way.
It’s historically valuable to look at the film for that reason, but that’s also not the only reason I thought this would be relevant to audiences in Saskatchewan specifically. This province doesn’t get a lot of mention in film for some reason, and it’s often the butt of a joke, whether it’s Susan Sarandon angrily yelling about the province in Atlantic City or Sissy Spacek dreaming about our mountains in Badlands as a way to illustrate her ignorance. But Within Our Gates features a scene near Indian Head, where Conrad Drebert (James D. Ruffin) is hanging out doing some sort of work in a tent and writing to his beloved. He’s the fiancee of the main character, Sylvia Landry (Evelyn Preer), the object of desire of Alma Prichard (Flo Clements), the rival of Alma’s step brother and general ne’er do well Larry Prichard (Jack Chenault) and quickly gone from the movie, after finding Sylvia in a compromising position, set up by Alma, and then having the rest of his scenes lost.
He does give us the inciting incident that gets Sylvia to go to the south and get involved in a school, which provides us with the first half of the movie, as Sylvia struggles to promote education for black children in the American south. He also inspires a regretful Alma to tell a doctor, and the audience, about Sylvia’s past and how her family was lynched for a crime they didn’t commit - though it’s not like people needed an excuse to lynch someone, given that one character was lynched because an angry mob wanted to lynch someone and he was nearby.
Within Our Gates, especially in the first half, can feel as much like a historic document as it does a work of art. Micheaux uses the film as a platform to discuss all the problems he sees in the world - racist white people, black people who get paid off to keep their own race down, ignorance, the fact that lynching is a real fear people have to face (the north is introduced as a relative paradise because it only has the occasional lynching, for example) - and sets about making a film that outlines all of these social ills. Which isn’t to say it’s not entertaining, a preacher who decries education as the road to hell gives an animated parody of a fire and brimstone sermon that’s pretty funny, but Micheaux has a point and he’s not going to leave a shadow of a doubt what that is. He’s a proud American who believes all men and women are equal, saying as much several times through the film and devoting all sorts of title cards to the subject. It can come across as a bit blunt some of the time, but one can certainly sympathize with the writer, director and producer, he’s made a film depicting the fear people of his race live under so he’s not going to leave any doubt as to his exact intentions here.
Watching the film in 2017 isn’t in ideal circumstances, but only a time machine would rectify that problem. Originally thought lost, it was found in a Spanish film archive. The intertitles, for the most part, had to be translated back from Spanish, one scene is definitely missing and it feels a bit like a couple more have been forgotten. There are many under-developed sub-plots, Sylvia has many suitors but not all of them have much reason to be there or have a romantic interest in her, Larry’s crime adventures don’t really go anywhere. Time didn’t cause a couple of issues. One, the makeup is terrible, whether we are talking about comically bad prop wigs or a beard that looks like it was applied with grease paint, though the budget here was small they probably could have just left the actors with their natural appearance. The other big issue is that it feels like two short stories awkwardly stitched together, Sylvia’s battle to save her school getting a bit more time but the tragic fate of Sylvia’s family being better told. Saving that story to be told as a big chunk of flashback at the end of the movie tips the narrative balance in a strange way, but I can understand why Micheaux did it, because that also saves the most brutal scene for the final reel.
The scene intercuts the lynching of Sylvia’s parents with her own assault by the man whose brother her father is accused of murdering. It’s an incredibly difficult sequence to watch, very well acted by both Preer and Grant Gorman, playing her assailant, and is more violent in its suggestion - ropes going over a beam, wood being piled - than a Mel Gibson film can manage with explicit gore. Micheaux wants the audience to reel back in horror at what happens to people because of their race, and it’s a haunting sequence.
But while that’s the headline scene in the movie, let’s not discount the other positives. The acting still holds up, a rarity for silent films. Flo Clements gets a lot of mileage out of some sly looks and Evelyn Preer adds complexity to her character in a range of subtle movements. While Micheaux doesn’t allow himself to be very subtle he does allow his actors to be, and as a result we have a pretty dramatic contrast to, say, a D.W. Griffith film, both in tone and in performance. It’s not completely modern - it’s still a silent, and Micheaux’s frame sometimes feels designed to keep set building minimal, given that doors are often off screen - but it’s not as alienating as a silent film can be.
Within Our Gates can be manipulative, Micheaux knows exactly how he wants his audience to react to characters and he’s not going to pretend otherwise. He’s not above outright telling us a character is a bad person, and he aims for a cheer every time they reach their comeuppance. He has a clear message he wants the audience to take away from this film, and he spells it out in each title card that comes on screen. The film itself makes it easy to understand Micheaux’s dislike of ambiguity, being misunderstood could be dangerous for a man in his position.
Film is often thought of as mere entertainment, but it’s also a clear reflection of the times where we live and the artists working in them. Within Our Gates clearly spells out what it was like to live in Micheaux’s America, the problems that surrounded him, and even what he saw as a solution - equal education for all people. The enduring value of the film is that, 97 years later, the problems Micheaux saw haven’t completely gone away, and his solution continues to make sense.
