Within Our Gates (Oscar Micheaux, 1920)

Evelyn Preer and Jack Chenault in Within Our Gates

Cast: Evelyn Preer, Flo Clements, James D. Ruffin, Jack Chenault, William Smith, Charles D. Lucas, Bernice Ladd, Mrs. Evelyn, William Starks, Mattie Edwards, Ralph Johnson, E.G. Tatum, Grant Edwards, Grant Gorman. Screenplay: Oscar Micheaux. No credited cinematographer, production designer, or film editor.

Famous as the oldest surviving feature film made by a Black director -- Oscar Micheaux's first movie, The Homesteader (1919), is lost -- Within Our Gates is not only a powerful response to the kind of racism represented by D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) but it's also a clear demonstration of Micheaux's skill as a director. It spares no one in its portrayal of the poison of racism: Its Black sycophants, toadying to the dominant white power, are as odious as its white bigots. The story centers on Sylvia Landry (Evelyn Preer), an educated Black woman who has moved north to try to work on behalf of the people she left behind in the South. She carries with her a secret about her parentage that is finally revealed only when she returns to the South to aid a Black minister who is trying to run a school. Micheaux lays several subplots, and perhaps a few too many melodramatic coincidences, onto this central one, but he keeps the drive of the film moving steadily through the climactic lynching scene and the revelation of Sylvia's secret. Within Our Gates was reconstructed from a print found in a Spanish archive, and although there are some visible gaps -- the largest one explained by a title card -- the restored version is remarkably coherent.

Body and Soul (Oscar Micheaux, 1925)

Paul Robeson, Julia Theresa Russell, and Mercedes Gilbert in Body and Soul

Cast: Paul Robeson, Mercedes Gilbert, Julia Theresa Russell, Marshall Rogers, Lawrence Chenault, Lillian Johnson, Madame Robinson, Chester A. Alexander, Walter Cornick. Screenplay: Oscar Micheaux. No other credited crew. 

The melodramatic imagination that crafts stories out of feelings and emotions is a precious thing, giving us an insight into the hidden lives of human beings uninflected by ideology. But the manners and behavior that grow out of these emotions change with the times, so what stirs the emotions of one generation seems ludicrous to the next, leading to an undervaluing and neglect of melodrama as an art form. Add to this a general intellectual mistrust of and contempt for appeals to the emotions, and it's easy to see why so much of the cinematic past that stemmed from this imagination has vanished, the victim of a kind of sanctioned neglect. And a special victim of this neglect would have to be the so-called "race movie," aimed almost exclusively at Black audiences. All of which makes the survival of even a deeply flawed film like Oscar Micheaux's Body and Soul so remarkable. Even in its carefully restored form, it has narrative gaps and character inconsistencies that suggest still-missing pieces. But it also preserves the essence of what Black audiences of the time thought and felt about themselves, along with portrayals of the desperation of poverty, the intense and sometimes blinding religiosity, and the indomitable hope. We can fault Body and Soul for its too-facile "it was all a dream" resolution, but we should also value it for endorsing the necessity of dream as an antidote for crushing despair. Watching it 95 years later, it's easy to be distracted by its antiquity, by the title cards written in a dialect that offends us, by the florid acting -- Paul Robeson apparently later tried to hide the fact that this was his first film, even though his is certainly the most impressive performance in it. Call the film naïve if you will, but see it as its first audiences saw it, as a validation of their hopes and fears, and it can be an intensely moving experience.