Slideshow
WITHIN OUR GATES
With recorded score by DJ Spooky
U.S., 1920
Written and directed by Oscar Micheaux
Starring Evelyn Preer, William Starks, Floy Clements
Silent with English intertitles.
Approx. 73 min. 4K DCP restoration from materials preserved by the Library of Congress.
When Sylvia Landry (“race film” super-star Evelyn Preer) gets swept up in the Great Migration from rural South to the big city, she makes discoveries about her own identity. Micheaux’s earliest surviving feature — or of any African American director. “Unfolds the vast political dimensions of intimate romantic crises. With a brisk and sharp-edged style, Micheaux sketches a wide view of black society, depicting an engineer with an international career, a private eye with influential friends, a predatory gangster, devoted educators — and the harrowing ambient violence of Jim Crow, which he shows unsparingly and gruesomely. Micheaux’s narrative manner is as daring as his subject matter, with flashbacks and interpolations amplifying the story; a remarkable twist regarding Sylvia’s identity, slipped in at the end, opens up a nearly hallucinatory historical vortex.” – Richard Brody, The New Yorker