Revisiting and Remixing Black Cinema

Abstract

The goal of Within Our Gates: Revisited and Remixed was to create a new way to critically read Oscar Micheaux's film, a way that refused the arbitrary divide between the past and the present, between the analog and the digital. Our creative collaborative was a combination of academics and community-based musicians, artists and scholars who sought to use musical improvisation and spoken word performance to rethink the exhibition of silent film. Within an institutional context of interdisciplinary cooperation, we brought to life theories of artistic collaboration, critical historiography, and multimedia exhibition in order to rescore this historically important film in a new reception context. Sociologists, film theorists, media historians, filmmakers, and local musicians worked together to mobilize public space and new media forms in order to reanimate a politically important film for a contemporary, heterogeneous audience.1 Within Our Gates Revisited and Remixed was a historical first for Ithaca College: a commission to a local composer to score and accompany a silent film for live performance. Founded in 1892 as a music conservatory, Ithaca College houses a preeminent school of music. It also has the well-known Roy H. Park School of Communications, which includes a film school that has existed for over thirty years. As a comprehensive college that mixes the liberal arts with professional schools such as music, communications, health sciences and human performance, and business, Ithaca College is not the typical small, liberal arts college. Rather, for most of its existence, Ithaca College has had high barriers among the six different schools and divisions, each of which is distinctive in its own educational mission and na-