Oct 24 2021
No Longer Silent

No Longer Silent

Presented by Sleep In Cinema Substrate Radio at Seasick Records

No Longer Silent: A live music/film experience
No Longer Silent will be an opportunity to highlight significant and historic silent films with live accompaniment from local music talent to create a one of a kind experience. Performances will be followed by panel discussions from local organizations giving audiences an opportunity to discuss and reflect on the ideas and concepts presented.

Within Our Gates description from publicdomainreview.org:
“The oldest known surviving film made by an African-American director, Within Our Gates is a searing account of the US racial situation during the early twentieth century, including the years of Jim Crow, the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, the Great Migration of Southern blacks to cities in the North, and the emergence of the “New Negro”. Directed by Oscar Micheaux, the film is one of the earliest and finest examples in the genre of “race films”. Produced outside the main Hollywood machine, these films were purposefully made for an all-black audience, featured black actors, and became important arenas through which representations of African-Americans in mass culture were contested. The plot of Within Our Gates centres around a mixed-race school teacher named Sylvia Landry who travels North to seek funds for a rural school in the Deep South for poor black children. Falling in love with a black doctor (who is “passionately engaged in social questions”), she reveals her family’s past, including the lynchings of her parents and the story behind her own European ancestry.
From the American Historical Association: ” … Micheaux offers a searing portrait of the ideology of white supremacy. Overturning prevailing wisdom, portrayed notably in D. W. Griffith’s film epic Birth of a Nation (1915), Within Our Gates underscores that racism is fueled by ignorance and hinders national unity. Whereas Griffith’s film suggests that the revelation of blacks’ true capacities and natures would restore racial unity and fraternity among northern and southern whites, Micheaux counters that if northern whites could see through the fog of white southern bigotry they would recognize that blacks were citizens worthy of both rights and respect.”

A panel discussion led by T Marie King and JCMP: Jefferson County Memorial Project will follow the screening.

Thanks to Substrate Radio, Seasick Records, and Saturn Birmingham .

Masks will be required.

Admission Info

Free admission, but there will only be 50 seats.
First come, first seated.
Masks will be required.
Reply to Facebook event page to notify hosts of your attendance.

Dates & Times

2021/10/24 - 2021/10/24

Additional time info:

Film run time is 1 hour 19 minutes.

Followed by a panel discussion around 20-30 minutes.

Location Info

Seasick Records

5508 Crestwood Boulevard, Birmingham, AL 35212