Aesthetics
Early judgments that Micheaux's work lacked aesthetic finesse or artistic power now appear short-sighted. Micheaux constructed Within Our Gates to educate his audience about racism, uplift, peonage, women's rights, and the urban "new Negro" emerging after the Great Migration.
His movement in the plot between North and South was similar to that of D. W. Griffith, who used a North-South marriage plot, but also expressed the mobility of peoples during this period. Griffith dramatized a white reunion of regions that canceled the legacy of Reconstruction to leave blacks out of the national picture. Micheaux's film ended with a wedding that united sophisticated African Americans from the North and South. Together, they symbolically lay claim to the whole nation, despite discrimination against blacks in the military, and the racial riots of 1919, which were based in labor and social competition.
Critics (such as Jane Gaines, Ronald Green, and Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence) celebrated the skill with which Micheaux intercut the lynching of the Landry family with the attempted rape of Sylvia by Gridlestone. This editing deconstructed the white ideology that lynching was to punish black men for alleged sexual assaults against white women. Micheaux portrayed the more frequent sexual assaults of black women by white men, alluding to the widespread historical practice of white men taking advantage of black women slaves. Other passages were edited to deconstruct white visual traditions and white ideologies.
He provided detailed layering of allusions to current social and political events, including the death of Theodore Roosevelt, the contributions of African-American soldiers to the war, and debates in the US Senate over Jim Crow and labor peonage in the South. The film can only be evaluated in its fragmentary form of the only surviving print.
Read more about this topic: Within Our Gates
Famous quotes containing the word aesthetics:
“What is the use of aesthetics if they can neither teach how to produce beauty nor how to appreciate it in good taste? It exists because it behooves rational human beings to provide reasons for their actions and assessments. Even if aesthetics are not the mathematics of beauty, they are the proof of the calculation.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“For aesthetics is the mother of ethics.... Were we to choose our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programs, there would be much less grief on earth. I believe—not empirically, alas, but only theoretically—that for someone who has read a lot of Dickens to shoot his like in the name of an idea is harder than for someone who has read no Dickens.”
—Joseph Brodsky (b. 1940)
“Nothing is beautiful, except man alone: all aesthetics rests upon this naïveté, which is its first truth. Let us immediately add the second: nothing is ugly except the degenerating man—and with this the realm of aesthetic judgment is circumscribed.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)