Maiden Alley Cinema’s monthly movie club, Paducah Film Society, is screening ‘Within Our Gates’, a silent drama film from 1920 directed by Metropolis native Oscar Micheaux, and will be shown alongside a live film score from a pair of Paducah based artists.
According to Maiden Alley Cinema’s website, Micheaux, the son of slaves, was born in 1884 in Metropolis, Illinois. He would later move to Chicago and then to South Dakota, where he would publish the first of his seven novels. He launched a film production company to adapt his book “The Homesteader” into his first feature film, which he directed and released in 1919. That first film was lost. His second film was “Within Our Gates,” a movie written, produced and directed by Micheaux.
One of the country’s first major Black filmmakers, Micheaux directed the race drama ‘Within Our Gates,’ which portrays racial violence under white supremacy. It tells the story of a young biracial woman visiting Boston during the Jim Crow era. She ultimately becomes a school teacher and tries to raise money for an underfunded, segregation-era institution that serves Black children.
Derek Operle of the Paducah Film Society said that this film is in line with the historic context of concern about the education of black Americans.
“There's a lot of concern, I think, along the lines of Booker T Washington's concerns like, ‘how educated are the black people in America at this point, and what are the things that are working against them getting that education?’” said Operle.
The historic film, Operle said, is often seen as a response to the 1915 D.W. Griffith film ‘Birth of a Nation’. It was banned in some theaters and inspired many protests through the time of its release. It depicts acts of racial violence, including a lynching.
“It comes out just a handful of years later, and it deals with racial violence and the Jim Crow era in in ways that I feel like you would be surprised to see from from a movie of its time, because obviously, it's a movie that's being made in the wake of World War One, and it's interrogating a lot of those race politics,” said Operle. “You see a flashback sequence where it's incredibly harrowing and violent for the time on screen, but you ostensibly see a lynching. It's very powerful and frightening to see, because this is a black director who is really trying to capture something that was a reality in the lives of so many people at the time. And that's the kind of thing you don't get to experience on screen very much.”
For this special screening, the 78-minute silent film will be scored by area musicians Clifton Davis and Keenan Perez of the Paducah-based soul band Groovelane.
“They are going to be playing, and they have been practicing for the movie. I feel like a lot of it is going to be jams that they've worked on. It's going to be kind of like improvised around these things that they've been working on. So it's not a written out score. It's going to be played live by Cliff and Keenan in the moment,” said Operle. “Then they will improvise around little bits that he has written for those scenes.”
Operle said he hopes audiences will come see ‘Within Our Gates’ and see a piece of history that was almost lost.
“When we talk about this being the oldest surviving film directed by a black American, it wasn't even the first. I'm not sure what the first was, but this is the oldest that you can possibly watch. And even this version that you'll see is reconstructed because of the intertitles, whenever you watch a silent film, that's when you see the dialog. You're given the opportunity to read what the character said, or read what a narrator is ostensibly telling you,” said Operle. “Those had to be reconstructed from a Spanish print of ‘Within Our Gates' that then had to be first translated to English, and then they brought in scholars who had studied Micheaux’s novels, because he was a novelist as well. And they wanted to put the intertitles, not only in English, but in his voice the way he would have written them, as close as they could approximate.”
The Paducah Film Society is Maiden Alley Cinema's own monthly movie club, screening classic, cult, and foreign films in western Kentucky. PFS is supported by Maiden Alley Cinema, WKMS, and local donors. This screening is sponsored by the McCracken County chapter of the NAACP. Promotional support comes from Minuteman Press in Paducah.
