These notes on Oscar Micheaux's Within Our Gates were written by Erica Moulton, PhD student in UW-Madison’s Department of Communication Arts. Within Our Gates will have a special screening in honor of Black History Month on Thursday, February 7 at the Chazen Museum of Art.

By Erica Moulton

Within Our Gates, Oscar Micheaux’s second feature film, is as powerful a refutation to the racism of Hollywood depictions of African Americans as any film produced in the early years of cinema. It is a well-disputed myth that there were no black filmmakers and producers at the beginning of the twentieth-century. William A. Foster founded the Foster Photoplay Company in 1910 based out of Chicago, Noble and George P. Johnson were producing films with their Lincoln Motion Picture Company between 1916 and 1921, and the Frederick Douglass Company operated out of Jersey City, New Jersey from 1916 to 1919. These companies (and many others) faced serious obstacles to production and distribution, including limited financial resources and restricted access to screening venues, but a rich output of films produced by black filmmakers, starring all-black casts, for black audiences flourished nonetheless.

Even within this culture of filmmakers, Oscar Micheaux was something of an outsider. After working as a Pullman porter, a homesteader, and a novelist, Micheaux directed his first silent feature, an adaptation of his own novel called The Homesteader in 1919. The film was the first production from his recently formed Micheaux Book and Film Company, and it is unfortunately lost, leaving Within Our Gates as the earliest available evidence of Micheaux’s considerable output. He directed 40 films over a 30-year career, eventually making the transition to sound in 1931 with Darktown Revue and The Exile. Although many of Micheaux’s films are thought to be lost, his legacy is now cemented as integral to the cannon of early American filmmakers and his ingenuity as a storyteller is finally being recognized.

His films that survive are visually arresting and full of distinct characters that serve both as mouthpieces for Micheaux’s messages of racial uplift while also standing on their own as rare examples in early cinema of black characters entirely in possession of their humanity. Within Our Gates features stage and screen actress Evelyn Preer as a Boston schoolteacher Sylvia, whose tragic backstory is told in a series of flashbacks in the latter half of the film. The main story positions her between the city and the countryside, as her newfound love, Dr. Conrad Drebert, is in Boston but her duties as an educator continually beckon her back to Piney Woods, Mississippi.

Micheaux’s films often have a strong moralistic bent, but that doesn’t stop him from occasionally reveling in the illicit goings-on of the Boston criminal underbelly. One of these Bostonian lawbreakers is Red, whose illegal poker game provides the set up for some of Micheaux’s most exciting camerawork and editing. In this early scene, Micheaux structures a series of insert shots revealing the criminal’s method of cheating, all while expertly building the tension between the players as one of them slowly realizes he is being duped. The scene culminates with a shoot-out that takes place partially in darkness. Throughout the entire scene, Micheaux is also completely at ease cross-cutting between the poker game and the unaware Sylvia, who sleeps peacefully at her cousin’s boarding house. When one of the men escapes to the boarding house after the shoot-out, Sylvia proclaims that she dreamed she saw him shoot a man. Amazingly, Micheaux structures the cross-cutting both to express parallel action, but also to potentially suggest that the poker game be interpreted as taking place in Sylvia’s head! Micheaux was long interested in dreams and premonitions, so these moments of ambiguity are common, though still no less shocking, in his films.

Arthur Jafa, the prominent black cinematographer on projects like Julie Dash’s Daughter of the Dust and Spike Lee’s Crooklyn, speaks of Micheaux’s ability to exist outside the norms created in Hollywood in Oscar Micheaux and His Circle (a fantastic book recently published in paperback by Indiana University Press). Jafa insists “that there is nothing arbitrary about Micheaux’s work, that it displays the most lucid kind of coherency. I think he was actually in the process of developing something equal to the aesthetic coherency of jazz.” Within Our Gates is endemic of Micheaux’s idiosyncratic style, particularly in the last act which reveals the tragedy that befell Sylvia prior to her arriving in Boston. Her story hinges on two acts of unspeakable violence, the lynching of Sylvia’s adopted family by a white mob and the attempted rape of Sylvia by a wealthy white landowner who turns out to be her biological father.

The unflinching presentation of these horrific acts led censors to ban the film in theaters or demand that Micheaux make cuts. When it was eventually released in Chicago in 1920, local aldermen feared the film would inspire riots. In Louisiana, the police were tipped off about the film, prompting them to visit the local picture houses, essentially ensuring it was not screened in any southern theater. In other cities, black theater owners and audiences rejected the film on the grounds that its depiction of a lynching was too painful to endure. Lincoln Motion Picture Company-owner George Johnson wrote to Micheaux telling him that many audiences simply walked out of the screenings in Omaha. Micheaux avoided making films as overtly political in the future, but he continued telling stories that challenged and entertained audiences for the next twenty years.

Oscar Micheaux was, above all else, an expert storyteller, able to marshal the expressive qualities of cinema to tell intricate stories that are often equal parts entertaining, thrilling and horrifying. In responding to Johnson’s comments about Within Our Gates, Micheaux wrote about his tendency to mix politics and storytelling, explaining, “It is true that our people do not care—nor the other races for that matter, for propaganda as much as they do for all story...I discovered that the first night Within Our Gates was shown. Still, I favor a strong story at all times, since I believe that every story should leave an impression.”