Review of Within Our Gates (1920) by Chris D — 03 Jul 2010

Good film, and an important piece of culture as the first surviving film directed and acted with African-Americans. The story is simple enough: A women who, while growing up. lost her adopted parents to lynching, fights to keep a black school running by traveling to Boston to raise funds. The threads in the film weren't as well directed as I would have hoped, so the film dragged somewhat, even taking into account its fairly short length. I usually enjoy strong use of title cards in silent films, but I think there were too many here: some scenes would just be quick cuts back and forth between the picture and text. This is the fundamental problem with silent films: you have to keep the dialogue to a minimum or you risk overwhelming the audience with walls of text. At the same time, if there's not enough dialogue you have no idea what is going on, or you just don't care. The robbery of Sylvia was funny, watching the thief foiled by a simple foot trip, but it felt like a scene, like several others, that, while enjoyable, didn't serve to advance the story.

The strong points for this film are the powerful moments leading up to and after the lynching of Sylvia's parents, with the powerful cuts between the bodies being burned in a bonfire and Sylvia being attacked by (what we learn a bit later) her natural father. I also enjoyed the side-scene of the apologist preacher, a man who has "given up my birthright" to appease white men, by preaching that black people should avoid wealth and education, for they are pathways to sin and hell. A very interesting character, although I'm not sure what kind of real-world impact people like him had in the 1920s on racial equality. Most importantly, it was just refreshing to see a silent film with black actors who aren't parodies of real people (counterexample, "The Birth of a Nation"). These are men and women who are intelligent and ambitious, a portrait that is not shown often enough at this point in history.