Oscar Micheaux - Within Our Gates (1919)

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Successful author, publisher, homesteader, and filmmaker, Oscar Micheaux is widely considered the father of African American cinema; only his second effort, Within Our Gates is one of 40 films Micheaux wrote, directed, and independently produced between 1919 and 1948. Besides its gripping narrative and artistic merits, Within Our Gates has immense historical value as the earliest surviving feature by an African American director. Powerful, controversial, and still haunting in its depiction of the atrocities committed by white Americans against blacks during this era, the film remains, in the words of one critic, "a powerful and enlightening cultural document [that] is no less relevant today than it was in 1920."

Made just five years after D.W. Griffith's racist masterpiece The Birth of a Nation (1915), Within Our Gates follows the struggle of Sylvia Landry (Evelyn Preer), a Southern black teacher who travels north in an effort to raise money for her school. But this is only one of several stories that Micheaux (who also wrote the screenplay) weaves together in his gripping look at the physical, psychological, and economic repression of African Americans.
Few people saw Within Our Gates as Micheaux intended it; the film was repeatedly edited by the censors, who found the rape and lynching scenes too provocative after the 1919 Chicago race riots. Lost for 70 years, Within Our Gates was rediscovered at the Filmoteca Espanola in Madrid and restored soon after. ~ Steven Jay Schneider.

(From the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die book).

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Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Oscar Micheaux - Within Our Gates (1919)

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