A Reading Of Micheaux s Within Our Gates - 1418 Words

Ryan Baxter Ben Strassfeld Professor Daniel Herbert Screen Arts Cultures 352 14 October 2015 A Reading of Micheaux’s Within Our Gates (1920) In 1920, pioneering African American film director Oscar Micheaux released his second picture, Within Out Gates. The film is a silent drama that revolves around a young professional woman, Sylvia Landry, her quest to fund an opening rural school for black children, and her past experience of violent racism in the South. It is a work largely concerned with African Americans as being at a sort of impasse in history and, furthermore, with the positing of a strong ideal of upward social mobility for black citizens going into the post-war era. In the film’s beginning, Micheaux introduces a†¦show more content†¦Further into the film, it becomes apparent that they are actually posited as two narratives of African American status in the United States. In the North, Micheaux portrays an African American professional middle class; in the South, he portrays African Americans as largely impoverished, uneducated, and subject to unfair systems of tenancy. In the North, there is a sense of opportunity; in the South, there is one of inferiority and constant struggle. Sylvia, who travels between these two worlds, can be seen as somewhat symbolic of her race at this point in history, or at least Micheaux’s ideal for advancement. She is educated, a professional, and individually capable; her main concern is with â€Å"the eternal struggle of her race and how she could uplift it.† Yet she is, at the same time, haunted by a past of subjugation and violence. In a jarring sequence toward the film’s end, it is revealed through flashback that her adoptive parents were lynched for the murder of their landlord, Gridlestone, a crime actually committed by a white tenant, and intercut with the depiction of this killing is an scene in which the victim’s brother, another white aristocrat, attempts to rape Sylvia in retribution. During this attack, the man realizes that Sylvia is his daughter from a past relationship with a black woman, w hich commentators, J. Ronald Green for one, speculate to be implied as similarly violent or coercive in nature. (Green, 40).