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1920s
WITHIN OUR GATES (1920)
U.S. (Micheaux) 79m Silent BW
Director: Oscar Micheaux
Producer: Oscar Micheaux
Screenplay: Oscar Micheaux, Gene DeAnna
Music: Philip Carli
Cast: Evelyn Preer, Flo Clements, James D. Ruffin, Jack Chenault, William Smith, Charles D. Lucas, Bernice Ladd, Mrs. Evelyn, William Stark, Mattie Edwards, Ralph Johnson, E.G. Tatum, Grant Edwards, Grant Gorman, Leigh Whipper
Successful author, publisher, homesteader, and filmmaker, Oscar Micheaux is widely considered the father of African American cinema; only his second effort, Within Our Gates is one of 40 films Micheaux wrote, directed, and independently produced between 1919 and 1948. Besides its gripping narrative and artistic merits, Within Our Gates has immense historical value as the earliest surviving feature by an African American director. Powerful, controversial, and still haunting in its depiction of the atrocities committed by white Americans against blacks during this era, the film remains, in the words of one critic, a powerful and enlightening cultural document [that] is no less relevant today than it was in 1920.
Made just five years after D.W. Griffiths racist masterpiece The Birth of a Nation (1915), Within Our Gates follows the struggle of Sylvia Landry (Evelyn Preer), a Southern black teacher who travels north in an effort to raise money for her school. But this is only one of several stories that Micheaux (who also wrote the screenplay) weaves together in his gripping look at the physical, psychological, and economic repression of African Americans.
Few people saw Within Our Gates as Micheaux intended it; the film was repeatedly edited by the censors, who found the rape and lynching scenes too provocative after the 1919 Chicago race riots. Lost for 70 years, Within Our Gates was rediscovered at the Filmoteca Española in Madrid and restored soon after. SJS
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1920s
KÖRKARLEN (1921)
THE PHANTOM CARRIAGE
Sweden (Svensk) AB) 93m Silent BW
Director: Victor Sjöström
Producer: Charles Magnusson,
Screenplay: Victor Sjöström, from novel by Selma Lagerlöf
Photography: Julius Jaenzon
Cast: Victor Sjöström, Hilda Borgström, Tore Svennberg, Astrid Holm, Concordia Selander, Lisa Lundholm, Tor Weijden, Einar Axelsson, Olof Ås, Nils Ahrén, Simon Lindstrand, Nils Elffors, Algot Gunnarsson, Hildur Lithman, John Ekman
A celebrated world success in its initial release, The Phantom Carriage not only cemented director-screenwriter-actor Victor Sjöström and the Swedish silent cinemas fame but also had a well-documented, artistic influence on many great directors and producers. The most well-known element of the film is undoubtedly the representation of the spiritual world as a tormented limbo between heaven and earth. The scene in which the protagonistthe hateful and self-destructive alcoholic David Holm (Sjöström)wakes up at the chime of midnight on New Years Eve only to stare at his own corpse, knowing that he is condemned to hell, is one of the most quoted scenes in cinema history.
Made in a simple but time-consuming and meticulously staged series of double exposures, the filmmaker, his photographer, and a lab manager created a three-dimensional illusion of a ghostly world that went beyond anything previously seen at the cinema. More important perhaps was the films complex but readily accessible narration via a series of flashbacksand even flashbacks-within-flashbacksthat elevated this gritty tale of poverty and degradation to poetic excellence.
Looking back at Sjöströms career, The Phantom Carriage is a theological and philosophical extension of the social themes introduced in his controversial breakthrough Ingeborg Holm (1913). Both films depict the step-by-step destruction of human dignity in a cold and heartless society, driving its victims into brutality and insanity. The connection is stressed by the presence of Hilda Borgström, unforgettable as Ingeborg Holm and now in the role of a tortured wifeanother desperate Mrs. Holm. She is yet again playing a compassionate but poor mother on her way to suicide or a life in the mental asylum.
The religious naïveté at the heart of Selma Lagerlöfs faithfully adapted novel might draw occasional laughter from a secular audience some eighty years later, but the subdued, realist acting and the dark fate of the main characters, which almost comes to its logical conclusion, save for a melodramatic finale, never fails to impress. MT
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1920s
ORPHANS OF THE STORM (1921)
U.S. (D.W. Griffith) 150m Silent BW
Director: D.W. Griffith
Producer: D.W. Griffith
Screenplay: D.W. Griffith, from the play The Two Orphans by Eugène Cormon and Adolphe dEnnery
Photography: Paul H. Allen, G.W. Bitzer, Hendrik Sartov
Music: Louis F. Gottschalk, William F. Peters
Cast: Lillian Gish, Dorothy Gish, Joseph Schildkraut, Frank Losee, Katherine Emmet, Morgan Wallace, Lucille La Verne, Sheldon Lewis, Frank Puglia, Creighton Hale, Leslie King, Monte Blue, Sidney Herbert, Lee Kohlmar, Marcia Harris
The last of D.W. Griffiths sweeping historical melodramas, Orphans of the Storm tells the story of two young girls caught in the turmoil of the French Revolution. Lillian and Dorothy Gish are Henriette and Louise Girard, two babies who become sisters when Henriettes impoverished father, thinking to abandon his daughter in a church, finds Louise and, moved by pity, brings both girls home to raise. Unfortunately, they are left orphaned at an early age when their parents die of the plague. Louise is left blind by the disease, and so the girls make their way to Paris in search of her cure. There they are separated. Henriette, kidnapped by the henchmen of an evil aristocrat, is befriended by a handsome nobleman, Vaudrey (Joseph Schildkraut). Louise is rescued by a kind young man after she falls into the River Seine but, brought to his house, she is put to work by the mans cruel brother. Adventures follow, including imprisonment in the Bastille, being condemned to death during the Reign of Terror, and saved from the guillotine by the politician Danton (Monte Blue), whose speech advocating the end of such bloodshed is one of the films most impassioned moments.