Customer Reviews

Within Our Gates

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is the foundation of Black films-the oldest surviving feature film by a Black American writer/director.

This is a brutally raw and truthful tale about a Black woman who goes to a rural school in the South to educate her people. It is revelaed that she has a past and her parents have been lynched. Being released after the 1919 race riots caused this film to be widely banned until its rediscovery as "La Negra" (The Black Woman) in Spain sixty years later.

This movie is uncompomisingly honest in displaying the obstacles educated Blacks faced in those days, both from white racists and black traitors. The Lynching scene is heart-wrenching (if not as graphic as the recent "Great Debaters") and the film stands as a good history lesson. The only problem is writer-director Oscar Michaeux's eccessive use of flashbacks tend to confuse the viewer and you'll have to watch this twice to really put everything together. That aside, it's an interesting look at the forerunner of all that was to come.

'Within Our Gates' (1920) is very hard to find and it was a very pleasant surprise to locate it via Amazon.com; I live in the UK and could not find it anywhere. The movie is great on a number of levels. It is a strikingly early movie to be depicting the challenges facing Afro-Americans to achieve education and betterment. It uses Afro-American actors rather than white actors 'blacked up'; and it is technically proficient for its time. What's more, and key if a movie is to entertain as well as broaden audiences' views of contemporary (then and now) issues, it's an engrossing story. Sure, there are some disjointed sequences and a small section of missing film, and the acting is inevitably mannered since the actors had to convey action and emotion through facial expression and body language. You'll soon settle into the rhythm of the film and it's a great riposte to D W Griffith's 'Birth of a Nation' just a few years earlier (1915), a movie landmark but flawed as a masterpiece with its view of the Klan as saviours. This is a gem that I won't be parting with.

Oscar Micheaux's 1919 WITHIN OUR GATES is a brilliant, complex feature film that is worth watching multiple times. I purchased this company/individual's version of the DVD and was extremely disappointed. I urge you to not waste your money. The DVD image quality is truly terrible, the music soundtrack is lousy, and there is even a break in the film when the projectionist changes reels. (This last detail adds an almost comical element to this DVD!) I have seen this film multiple times and did not have these issues with other versions/formats of the film -- these problems are specific to this particular DVD seller. The image quality of this DVD is so bad that I wonder if it is a transfer from some kind of bootleg VHS video from the 1970s. Don't buy from this vendor, find another place to purchase this DVD, so you can appreciate this important work of cinema history.

I purchased this DVD for an assignment in a film class, and I must say that I learned a lot about one of the first pioneers of Black cinema.

Of course it is naif in the eyes of the 2008 viewer, but let`s try to recover it`s idealism