W. Griffith's 1915 silent film "Birth of a Nation" was a movie of extremes. Picture "Titanic," "Pulp Fiction" and "The Passion of the Christ" rolled into one: biggest profits, cleverest techniques and sharpest division.

It made big money by using inventive film techniques to present a cast of inflammatory caricatures: lazy and lecherous black people, noble and racist white people.

In doing so, it inspired powerful, sometimes violent, reactions. History books often link the popularity of "Birth of a Nation" - which premiered in Los Angeles under the title "The Clansman" - to the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan that followed. The newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People protested screenings and circulated harsh reviews.

In the years that followed, filmmakers would address Griffith's movie with opposing portrayals of race relations in America. Among them would be the director, novelist and one-time Roanoker, Oscar Micheaux.

A filmmaker of influence

Oscar Micheaux was born in Illinois in 1884, and as a teenager worked the railroads as a Pullman porter. After a stint homesteading in South Dakota, Micheaux beganturning his experiences into novels that he published and peddled himself. In 1919, when a black-owned movie production company offered to adapt his novel "The Homesteader" for the screen, Micheaux - a lifelong businessman - made the movie himself.

The Micheaux Film Corporation soon followed, as did Micheaux's influential career in film. Between the World Wars, he would be one of the most prolific producers of "race movies," films that were screened to black audiences in segregated theaters.

"I think if you asked Spike Lee who the most influential black filmmaker of the century was, he'd probably say Micheaux," said Ed Barnett, a Roanoke architect who has spent years researching Micheaux's life.

Micheaux first appeared in Roanoke in 1921. Whether he arrived in search of movie capital or because of a railroad connection is lost to history, though the city seems to have been a good fit. Micheaux directed and released more silent films here than from anywhere else outside New York City, Barnett said.

As a filmmaker, Micheaux seems to have been flexible. He used local actors for his productions, said John Kern, director of the Roanoke Regional Preservation Office, and made the difficult transition from silent films to talkies in the 1920s.

One notable picture from Micheaux's Roanoke days was "The House Behind the Cedars," which included scenes of a garden party shot on the 400 block of Gilmer Avenue. No prints of the film remain, but it is well documented that Oliver Hill, the prominent civil rights attorney who grew up on the block, makes an on-screen appearance as a child.

The Virginia State Board of Censors would go on to reject the film for its depiction of an interracial couple.

Responding to racism

Coming four years after "Birth of a Nation," Micheaux's "Within Our Gates" would be one of his earliest and most significant films. He wrote and directed the sprawling story of racial injustice that centers on Sylvia Landry, a black schoolteacher.

In 1993, after the film had disappeared for years, a single copy turned up in Spain. With some restoration efforts, which included translating the movie's intertitles from Spanish back into English, the movie has been judged the earliest surviving feature film by a black director.

"Within Our Gates" follows some melodramatic cliches, but includes a provocative scene of a near rape. In it, a white man forces himself on Sylvia until, in a twist fit for Greek drama, he recognizes a scar on her chest and realizes he is her father.

The scene corresponds to a climactic moment in "Birth of a Nation," where a crazed-looking black man pursues a white woman to the edge of a cliff, with the suggestion of raping her. Rather than face her attacker, the woman takes a suicidal leap.

The two scenes, taken together, turn conflicting lenses onto the era's race relations. Griffith uses fear to drum up support for the Ku Klux Klan. Micheaux uses the symbolism of a father unwittingly assaulting his flesh and blood to suggest that whites' racist attacks may be an attack on their own humanity - an attack, perhaps, "within our gates."