In Black City Cinema, Paula Massood shows how popular films reflected the massive social changes that resulted from the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to cities in the North, West, and Mid-West during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Paula Massood demonstrates how the urban has functioned as a central organizing trope in the articulation of Black culture, progress, protest and subjectivity. Massood probes into the relationship of place and time, showing how urban settings became an intrinsic element of African American film as Black people became more firmly rooted in urban spaces and more visible as historical and political subjects. Illuminating the intersections of film, history, politics, and urban discourse, she considers the chief genres of African American and Hollywood narrative film: the black cast musicals of the 1920s and the "race" films of the early sound era to blaxploitation and hood films, as well as the work of Spike Lee toward the end of the century.

The most relevant chapter would be the second, which discusses city motifs in race films from the early sound era. Her two main examples of race films are The Scar of Shame and Within Our Gates as the illustrations for African American urbanscapes. She also goes on the discuss how the film upheld ideals of individualism and ambition, but was still targeted by both whites and blacks. She also states that the film’s message is, “racially motivated violence directed at African Americans was often caused by economic jealousy or lust rather than any actual illegal acts perpetrated by its victims.” This goes against Birth of a Nation clearly and she also mentions the race riots that occurred in Chicago during the time.

Gaines, Jane. “Fire and Desire: Race, Melodrama and Oscar Micheaux”. Black American Cinema. Ed. Manthia Diawara. New York: Routledge, 1993, 49-70.

The work of early Black filmmakers is given serious attention for the first time in “Black American Cinema”. Individual essays consider such topics as what a Black film tradition might be, the relation between Black American Filmmakers and filmmakers from the Diaspora, the nature of Black film aesthetics, the artist's place within the community, and the representation of Black imaginary.

Both movies, Within Our Gates and The Birth of a Nation, have caused a lot of protest because of their racially brutal images. However the protests had different focuses. People did not want to see Micheaux ‘s film because it was too much of the truth, and people did not want to see Griffith’s film because it did not have enough. Gaines argues that the main issue was the idea of truth. The biggest difference between the two films is the fact that Micheaux has his film focus on black life and the middle class. Another interesting point that Gaines makes is that, “while the White supremacist version of the Civil War survived, Micheaux’s African American history lesson disappeared and was classified by film scholars as lost.” She discusses how the Spanish version, La Negra, that was found 70 years later is just a skeleton of the original. The lynching scene seems tangential to the story line, and yet it is the most important scene it seems for Micheaux. By turning this scene into such an important spectacle, he was trying to encourage indignation in the Black audiences, according to Gaines. Going along with many other articles on the subject, she discusses the cross-cutting in this sequence and how Micheaux displayed his unconventional style in his films.

In a feat of historical investigation and vivid storytelling, this film biographer takes on one of the greatest and most complex figures in American entertainment, Oscar Micheaux, the son of freed slaves who formed his own film production company after Hollywood failed to bid high enough for film rights to his stories. Paced like a novel, the book is sprinkled liberally with Micheaux's own words. Micheaux's career began to fizzle, along with race films, in the late 1930s, and he died in obscurity in 1951. Rediscovered decades later, he is now considered, as McGilligan puts it, the Jackie Robinson of American film.

The book overall is a wonderful resource on background knowledge regarding aspects of Micheaux's life that others cannot find easily. The most important chapter would be Chapter 9, focusing on the years between 1919 and 1921. Since Within Our Gates came out in 1920, it gives a timeline of the events that were going on right before the movie and while filming was taking place. You can also learn some really interesting facts about the movie and how Micheaux was able to get this film out to the masses and how the original version has been lost. We also learn that he likes to always have some sort of message in his films, despite having them just be entertaining. The author also considers the flashback of the lynching to be “one of the most powerful sequences in Micheaux's body of work”.

Siomopoulos, Anna. "The Birth of a Black Cinema: Race, Reception, and Oscar Micheaux's Within Our Gates," The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, vol. 6.2 (Fall), 111-118, 2006.

This article talks about Oscar Micheaux's film and how it provided a rebuttal to Griffith's depiction of black violence and corruption with a story of the injustices faced by African Americans in a racist society. Siomopoulos primarily talks about the style of editing that were in both films.  Siomopoulos states, “The complicated style of Micheaux's editing works to constitute a spectator who is more politically critical than the spectator constructed by the classical Hollywood style of Griffith's film” It compares the editing of the two films and talks about how live music plays a part in the spectatorship of the film.

This article helps to show the similarities and differences between the two films, but it uses Birth of A Nation as the main comparison piece. This helps to answer the question about how the films incorporate their views in opposite ways, by explaining the cutting. It also breaks down and explains the narrative juxtapositions in the films. Birth of a Nation uses crosscutting to present a very simple opposition between white virtue and black villainy; in contrast, Micheaux's film uses a complex editing pattern to present a larger social vision of many different, competing political positions within both white and African American society. so this article helps greatly to answer the questions about how these two film relate to each other, in style and content.

Baldwin, Davarian L. Chicago's New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

While the book follows the stories and innovations of Madame CJ Walker, Thomas A. Dorsey, Oscar Micheaux and baseball's Rube Foster, it also provides a space in which we get to hear the thoughts and words of everyday people, those who sat in beauty parlors, enjoyed the early years of cinema, and made a way despite the racial, social and economic limitations. While the book is a scholarly monograph, Baldwin's expedition into social and cultural theory is so nuanced as to make the book accessible to a wider audience. Davarian Baldwin argues overall that this mass consumer marketplace generated a vibrant intellectual life and planted seeds of political dissent against the dehumanizing effects of white capitalism.

This book overall is great wonderful if you want to learn about black innovators in Chicago. But if you are interested in Oscar Micheaux in particular, then the best chapter would be the fourth entitled, “The Birth of Two Nations: White fears, black jeers, and the rise of a race film consciousness”.  The chapter begins by discussing the history and impact of Birth of a Nation. It was an escape in which the traditional white power structure of the South was asserted and black migrants had never come north. But Baldwin proves this point invalid in his historical evidence and he also shows that Griffith’s film created two nations because people like Micheaux had to respond to the story that was told in Birth of Nation. A really interesting point that he mentions is that fact that films like Within Our Gates had to constantly battle with showing the truth of the South to the masses, but also still keeping the traditional black amusement forms. He calls this “sensational realism”. He then goes on the mention Micheaux’s life and Baldwin notes the significance of Oscar Micheaux's five silent and nine sound films in constructing a New Negro racial consciousness. He gives plenty of historical evidence and reviews from the time, which helps to put the films in a clear cultural perspective.

In his essay, Professor of Cinema Studies at City University of New York, David A. Gerstner compares the styles and editing techniques of the black father of cinema, Oscar Micheaux, with those of the whit father of cinema, D.W. Griffith. Despite their similarities, like laying new creative groundwork for cinema, or the use of melodramatic devices to heighten both spectator response and the spectacle unfolding onscreen, Gerstner quickly establishes a crucial disparity between these two "fathers" of film: Micheaux and Griffith's similar use of temporally ambiguous parallel editing must be traced along a different set of cultural and aesthetic paths. Gerstner examines the classical Hollywood cinema, to which Griffith attributed greatly, mode of production, largely considered to be an illusory and cohesive filmic representation of time and space. Gerstner goes on to describe Griffith's works and use of parallel editing. Then, Gerstener discusses Micheaux's approach to film, and the similarities of Micheaux and Griffith's parallel editing. The essay highlights the "affect cut:" how directors, especially Micheaux, reorganize time and space within their films for a more powerful affect upon the audiences. Finally, Gerstner explains the projections of black manhood in Micheaux's Within Our Gates.

Gerstner's views are useful for my essay because his assessment can further my argument concerning Micheaux's individualistic style as a rejection of Griffith's popular Hollywood methods. Gerstner clarifies Micheaux's use of flashbacks for temporal vagueness, describing them as components that saturate the filmic present with the weight of the traumatic past. Micheaux wanted his audience to be unsure of shifts in space and time to emphasize the magnitude of this burden of the past on his characters. In order to fully relate to the story, Micheaux thought viewer must experience the trouble and stress of the burden as much as the characters in the film.