The Complete Oscar Micheaux: Within Our Gates (1920)
Director: Oscar Micheaux Run Time: 74 min. Rating: NR Release Year: 1920
Starring: Charles D. Lucas, Evelyn Preer, Flo Clements, Jack Chenault, James D. Ruffin
Country: United States
Language: English
The Complete Oscar Micheaux, presented from Thursday, September 19—Saturday, September 28, 2024. The program concludes with a limited engagement of the 2021 documentary Oscar Micheaux: The Superhero of Black Filmmaking on Sunday, September 29.
About the film:
This presentation is a 4K DCP restoration from materials preserved by the Library of Congress of Micheaux’s earliest surviving feature, and the earliest surviving feature of any African American director.
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.
“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.”
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker
About the filmmaker:
Oscar Devereaux Micheaux was an author, film writer and director, and independent producer of more than 44 silent films and sound films from 1919—1948. Micheaux was the first African American filmmaker to produce a full feature-length film and is regarded as a prominent producer of race films, and the most successful African American filmmaker of the first half of the 20th century. Micheaux’s work is not only a milestone in African American cinema, but an incredible insight into American history regarding race in society.
Born in 1884 to enslaved parents, Micheaux first left home to work for the railroads in Chicago. He had his sight set higher as a writer and a determined creative. He wrote a series of novels, including his self-published The Homesteader. Not only was Micheaux a pioneer in African American cinema, but also in independent publishing and filmmaking. After turning down offers to produce his novel into a film, he later found his own path to producing the 1919 film. Micheaux serves as a symbol of triumphing over the circumstances at hand to bring his vision to reality. The groundbreaking auteur’s features include The Symbol of the Unconquered (1920), Body and Soul (1925), Within Our Gates (1920) and Birthright (1938).
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