1920/USA 79m Dir: Oscar Micheaux
Original Screenplay
Quite a lot of contextual knowledge is needed to understand this film so in seeking out that knowledge I've learnt some stuff. This is the earliest existing film from an African-American director, Oscar Micheaux, and so it tells a story of black Americans and riffs off The Birth of a Nation which was released five years previously.
The film tells the story of Sylvia Landry (Evelyn Peter), a black woman who tries to raise money in the North for a school in the Deep South for poor black children. Along the way she discovers revelations about her families past.
Like The Birth of a Nation, this film features a scene depicting a lynching although it's obviously portrayed in a very different and much more negative way. The lynching is intercut with an attempted rape of Sylvia which works as a deconstruction of the white ideology that lynching was a punishment for black men for sexually assaulting white men when in reality it was much more frequent that black women were raped by white men. It also nods to the historical practice of white men raping their black female slaves and the fact that Sylvia turns out to be mixed-race alludes to this too.
The other particularly heart-breaking moment in the film is far less violent. We see Old Ned, a black preacher, say to his congregation that the black community will get into heaven because they are not educated and repeats the idea to his white friends. When he leaves the room though he turns to camera and says, via intertitle, that "Again, I've sold my birthright. All for a miserable mess of pottage. Negroes and Whites - all are equal. As for me miserable sinner, hell is my destiny." It's a well observed moment about individuals rejecting their community to earn the respect of white people, a theme we see several times in the film.
I thought the writing and acting was great here but I'm not sure if it was the budget or Micheaux's inexperience as a director but there isn't a great deal of artistry in the way the film is shot which is a shame as it's really the only thing letting the film down.
An important part of film history that feels like an early twentieth century version of a Steve McQueen film.
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