Oscar Micheaux's "Within Our Gates" (1919)

Before watching Oscar Micheaux’s 1919 film titled Within Our Gates, I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I thought that, because it was made in 1919, it would most likely be black and white and a silent film. But I have never actually seen a full-length silent film before, so I was a bit skeptical about it. To my surprise, I generally liked the film. But, like with most films, there were things I really liked about it and things I didn’t really appreciate.

To start off, I really enjoyed the overall message of this film because I felt it was uplifting. The film revolved around the life of Sylvia Landry, a black woman who cared about the education and general well-being of her race. In the story, she is determined to find some way to raise enough money to keep a school for African American children up and running. During the film, a wealthy white woman named Mrs. Warwick accidentally hits Sylvia with her car, and then offers to help Sylvia with her cause of keeping the school open. Although the director makes sure the audience realizes that racism is at its peak during this time, Mrs. Warwick stays true to her word of helping out the school by donating $50,000 to keep it up and running. However, she did not have an easy time deciding whether or not she would go through with her donation. Mrs. Warwick asks her close friend Mrs. Stratton for advice on the matter because she believes Mrs. Stratton is more knowledgeable on this subject matter. Unfortunately, Mrs. Stratton is extremely racist and tells her friend not to waste her money by giving it to a school for black children because she claims that “an education would just give them headaches.” After considering her options, Mrs. Warwick decides that she is going to donate more than the original amount she promised to Sylvia of $5,000 and increase it to $50,000. I really appreciated that Micheaux not only had Mrs. Warwick keep her word to Sylvia but had her increase her donation to an even more generous amount. Micheaux demonstrated how ignorant racists can be and how race shouldn’t make a difference to people. Even though I appreciated the overall theme of this film, there were a lot of things I didn’t really like about it.

For a lot of the film, I felt very lost and confused because of the amount of characters Micheaux had in it. Due to the large amount of characters in the film, there were a lot of plots within the larger plot, and I think that confused me even more because I wasn’t able to keep track of each character and their individual story. It was just a lot for me to handle all at once. I think the film would have been better if there were fewer characters and less mini plots. I also had a more difficult time than I thought watching this movie simply because it was a silent film. As I stated earlier, this was my first silent film. To be honest, I thought it would be easier to follow because it was silent. But I think I ended up being more confused because I would see the characters talking to each other for long periods of time, but the intertitles wouldn’t come up for a while so I would sit there trying to figure out what was going on. I must admit that watching a silent film is much more confusing than watching a film with sound. I mean, you could probably enjoy a film with sound but no/less picture because you would still be able to relatively know what’s going on. Actually, I would be interested to just listen to the audio of a movie to see if that’s possible to enjoy….

Anyway, I did find some of the technical aspects of the film interesting and enjoyable, such as his obvious play on the colors black and white. He made it very clear to the audience who was supposed to be portrayed and good and who was supposed to be evil by the clothes they wore. For most of the film, Sylvia was wearing very white dresses, which made the audience see her as the heroine of the story. But her cousin Alma, who purposely sabotaged Sylvia’s relationship with her future husband, wore a lot of black. This made the audience view Alma as evil and a bad person. I just thought it was very clever of Micheaux to use this tool in a black and white movie because it just goes to show that you do not necessarily need colors in a film to convey a certain message.

But after watching and thinking about the film, I still have some unanswered questions about it. Why would Micheaux choose to have so many characters in this film? Did he not think it would be as confusing as it actually was? I didn’t think some of the characters were even needed….Also, what happened to Sylvia’s younger brother Emil? The last the audience saw him was when he rode off on a horse as he was trying to escape being lynched. Did he survive or was he later found and killed? I would be interested to hear anyone’s thoughts on any of these questions. :)