On Saturday, ETSU’s film studies program put on a free screening of “Within Our Gates,” a 1920 monumental silent film by Oscar Micheaux at the Tipton Gallery. The screening was accompanied by music from Kalia Yeagle and Roy Andrade, band directors and professors from ETSU’s Bluegrass, Old Time and Country Music program.
“We didn’t have that much time to come up with music to play during the screening, and we wanted to respond to each scene in a deliberate way, but it would’ve taken a year to do so,” Andrade said. “We broke it up to 5-minute segments and tried to find the tone, but most of it was improvised and it was super fun.”
Following the screening of Micheaux’s film, a discussion was held with Daryl Carter, a professor in ETSU’s history department, about race relations as it relates from the 1920 film to now.
“I think there was reception but not as much in terms of viewership as The Birth of a Nation because it had Presidential support,” said Dr. Carter. “A film like this was not perceived as well in white America back then as not many people would see it.”
Micheaux’s film was a groundbreaking silent film, as he was the first prominent African-American feature filmmaker. The film was made in Chicago and was a direct response to D.W. Griffith’s “A Birth of A Nation,” a highly controversial film that is credited with the creation of the modern Ku Klux Klan.
“When this film was made in 1920, black people were coming back from France, and there was widespread violence from coast to coast with race riots,” Carter said. “I think of it as a community that is doing its best to uplift the race.”
The film, intersecting life in the North and the South, touches across the ideas of interracial relationships, racial hypocrisy, racial violence, lynching and the false portrayals of African-Americans.
“For me, the scene when the woman is being attacked, and as he noticed the scar on her chest surprised me,” Carter said. “That struck me, not just because of the sexual violence but because it was his own daughter.”
Micheaux’s film started off as a love story dealing with jealousy but quickly transitioned into a story about a struggle towards equality and better ideals. At the same time, a woman with a painful backstory tries to help find money to keep a southern school for African-Americans from closing due to lack of funds.
“I think it is one of the most important films in silent film history,” said Matthew Holtmeier, co-director and a professor of the film studies program, said. “We are showing one of the most famous silent film because it rivals some of the most famous films in the silent film genre, and an interesting thing is that from 1948, which was Oscar’s last film, there were no feature films made by an African-American until 1968, when ‘The Story of a Three-Day Pass’ comes out.”
This event was part of a series of showings called “Appalachian Silent Cinema and Old-Time/Bluegrass Screening Series.” The next event will be a screening of “Tol’able David” on Nov. 7 at 7 p.m. at the International Storytelling Center.
