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.

In the 1920 silent race film "Within Our Gates" by Oscar Micheaux, he shows the racial condition in America during the years of Jim Crow, the Great Migration, and the emergence of the "New Negro." The film is about an African-American woman who goes North to help a minister in the Deep South raise money to keep a school open for poor Black children. Her romance with a black doctor opens up stories about her family's past as well as the racial skeletons in America's closet. The release of D. W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation" four years earlier made him want to make this film. Both films incorporate controversial subject matter; lynching, rape, and miscegenation are represented in the films, but from opposite ends of the political spectrum. In "Within Our Gates", Micheaux wants to educate his audience about racism, uplift of a people, and the urban "new Negro" emerging after the Great Migration. But how does Oscar Micheaux battle the racist representations from Griffith and portray the many different faces of the African American society through film?

Citation:

Bilwakesh, Nikhil. "Alias Jeremiah: Oscar Micheaux's pathetic preachers." West Virginia University Philiological Papers Vol.15 (2003) .

Content and Relevance of Work:

In Nikhil Bilwakesh's article, "Alias Jeremiah: Oscar Micheaux's Pathetic Preachers", he delves into the illustration of preachers in Micheaux's early novels as well as his two early films: Within Our Gates and Body and Soul. Bilwakesh also analyzes Micheaux's integrationist philosophy in terms of racial superiority. His argument in the article is to demonstrate two of Micheaux's goals in films such as Body and Soul: First, to portray preachers as beings who should be sympathized with because they have fallen to corruption due to unfortunate circumstances. Second, to show the merits of racial integration. He focuses on the Reverend Jenkins character in Body and Soul, claiming that the Reverend is presented in a negative light in order to elicit sympathy from the viewer because black preachers such as Jenkins are vulnerable to the "traps of corruption". Bilwakesh points to Jenkins' alcoholism and solitary drinking as ways in which Micheaux conveys the misery of the preacher. Although Bilwakesh is focusing on the religious connotations of Micheaux's film, in doing so he also addresses the question of why Micheaux presents negative images of blacks in the film. It could be that Micheaux presents these negative images of black characters such as the stereotypical black Reverend Jenkins in order to convey their pathetic and thus sympathetic sides. Bilwakesh's discussion of Micheaux's integrationist theory is also relevant to the investigation. He points to the superiority of "mulattoes" in Micheaux's films and how these characters are almost always the "healthiest and sanest" and most "positive characters". The negative characters, Bilwakesh claims, are usually presented as either dark black or starkly white, such as the preacher and the white racist mobs in Body and Soul. Bilwakesh sees this positive representation of people of mixed-race as Micheaux's attempt at destroying stereotypes from white films such as Birth of a Nation. This emphasis on Micheaux's integrationist philosophy is also very relevant to the posed question and almost leans toward the argument that Micheaux was somewhat racist against his own kind and saw superiority in a mixed race.

Citation:

Wiesenfeld, Judith. "For the Cause of Mankind: The Bible, Racial Uplift and Early Race Movies." African Americans and the Bible. Ed. Vincent L. Wimbush and Rosamond C. Rodman. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2001. 728-740.

Content and Relevance of Work:

In her article "For the Cause of Mankind: The Bible, Racial Uplift and Early Race Movies" found in the book African Americans and the Bible, Judith Wiesenfeld explores both the prevalence of religious themes in early black films and the ways in which early black filmmakers attempted to respond to D.W. Griffith's negative representation of blacks in his film Birth of a Nation. Wiesenfeld first analyzes Birth of a Nation which she sees to be the catalyst for much of early black film as it denigrated blacks and promoted a racist ideology. She then explores the overall ineffectiveness of the initial response by blacks embodied in the film Birth of a Race which attempted to use the Bible to emphasize equality. The rest of her essay focuses on the methods of one particular black filmmaker, Oscar Micheaux, and his creation of films such as Within Our Gates and Body and Soul to respond to widespread racism against blacks in white films. Wiesenfeld takes a look at Body and Soul and demonstrates how Micheaux depicted blacks as thinking members of complex communities which varied according to class, education, religion and politics. She emphasizes this "complex" image of blacks which Micheaux chose to present instead of a deliberately positive one. Wiesenfeld also comments on Micheaux's use of religion and the Bible in Body and Soul to accentuate black rights and equality. Wiesenfeld's essay is extremely relevant to the investigation in that she explores directly the absence of a positive representation of blacks in Micheaux's Body and Soul. Nevertheless, she makes clear that Micheaux made his film as a response to racism in order to demonstrate the misunderstood complexity of blacks and their inherent claim to equal humanity. She would also argue that religion and the Bible were important concepts used by Micheaux to convey the equality deserved by all human beings. From this article I would assume that Wiesenfeld would reject the notion that Micheaux was racist against his own kind in creating films such as Body and Soul.