5 The Blood of Jesus

Religious themes and their variants constitute the most self-contained subgenre of black film. And yet the large number that have appeared preclude the forming of sharp-edged categories. At its most inspirational, religion speaks through myth, ritual, symbol, and in-group advocacy. By defining rules of conduct, it provides its celebrants with a personal anatomy of the good life. At the other end of the scale of variants, religious film has been overintellectualized, sermonizing, falsely pious, literal, barren of pregnant symbols, and capable of serving only to half conceal that which the faithful were supposed to excoriate. Like Cecil B. DeMille's biblical epics which titillated the audience with moral ambiguities, black religious genre films always ended properly with a punitively apocalyptic last reel.

Often Hollywood religious movies suffered from timidity cultivated by the practice of soliciting theological opinions from clergymen or by making flatteringly unctuous portraits of popular divines such as Norman Vincent Peale. As an example, DeMille regularly called upon the influential Jesuit, Father Daniel Lord, for counsel on the technical theological details that went into the manufacture of his great crimson movies. The result was harmless colorful pap that snaked between watchful Jews on the alert for anti-Semitism dressed in bible stories and the Catholics' Legion of Decency and other watchdog agencies looking for presumed blasphemies. As a result, ethnic traits all but disappeared from Jewish depictions, and Catholies were shown as dynamic football coaches,Fighting Father Dunne, The Hoodlum Priest, and the whimsical elfin priests of Going My Way. Protestants, lacking such institutionalized scouts and friends at court, fared less well and appeared only in stodgy pieties such as the biography of religious pop culture heroes like Peter Marshall in A Man Called Peter.

In a rare, if accidental, position of strength, black filmmakers were freed from such constraints because their specialized audience preferred more direct religiosity. Indeed, because a few black filmmakers worked as genuine primitive artists, their own lack of expertise contributed innocently to powerful statements of faith and meaning quite beyond the Hollywood-produced films. Unfortunately, small homogeneous audiences composed of the faithful few hardly encouraged wide and prosperous distribution.

Thus of all the black subgenres, the religious tracts seemed most in danger of falling into parochial channels of meaning. In the 1930s, for example, Eloise Gist used highly personal films depicting literal symbols of her fundamentalist faith. For her, the act of sin invoked the real threat of devils, who carried sinners as passengers on an actual train to Hell. Because the images were intended to serve a flock of true believers, Gist felt no duty to aesthetics. Therefore her power resided only in her conviction and touched only the members of her cult.

Coincident with Gist's creative years, King Vidor's treatment of black religion was almost too persuasive and therefore implausible in its ability to evoke an immediate conversion experience. In Hallelujah! the rebirth of an amoral saloon girl, Chick, often brings an uncomfortable laugh. No matter how effective are his dramatized sermonic allegories, Zeke, a preacher, converts her so rapidly that she is merely out of character.

Later religious film attained greater political and social sophistication. Among the best modern examples was St. Claire Bourne's Let the Church Say Amen (1973), a straightforward television documentary whose spirit was touched more by cinematic training than by religious conviction or lifelong observation of Southern lore. Its strength was in its advocacy rather than its liturgy—specifically in a plea for a reexamination of the black church's apparent conservatism during the civil rights movement. Unlike other films on black religion, St. Claire Bourne's folk religionists were thus spoken for by an outsider employing an intellectual approach and craftsmanship.

This is not to say that all the subgenre films took the form of political or religious tracts. Gordon Hitchens's and Ken Resnick's Sunday on the River (1961), an alternately moody and spirited visual poem, broke out of the rigid mold of social realism that most American documentary had inherited from the age of The March of Time and Robert Flaherty. By using, rather than merely recording, visual reality, the filmmakers focused on the details of social anatomy as symbols in a sometimes unconscious allegory whose point of departure was a Sunday excursion down a Harlem street, to a Hudson pier, and then up the river to Bear Mountain Park. A track of lilting folk music accented the visual imagery of a pilgrimage from streetscape to green space. The technique impressed film critics and juries at Venice, Melbourne, and other international film festivals.

The neutral and quiet treatment of Sunday on the River stood in contrast to several others based on harsh anatomical reportage that laid bare black religion. For example, in his Rockefeller Foundation-supported Black Delta Religion (1975) released by the Center for Southern Folklore, William R. Ferris, Jr. followed King Vidor's lead in taking an anthropological point of view. This little film, a blow up from super-8, recorded the fervor of a black flock, its cadenced preacher, its women "getting happy," a baptism in a Southern river, and ended with a symphony of clapping, guitars, and tambourines. Reportage predominated over symbolism.

In contrast, Sunday on the River was a tour de force of symbol, metaphor, and allegory presented at the expense of literal anatomical details and the rhetoric of advocacy. The film opens on a sunny Harlem street that cannot hide the squalor of broken buildings and rubble-strewn lots. A flurry of cuts moves the viewer from old folks lounging on the steps and curbs to sleekly proud kids, sometimes capped by a processed forelock, in Sunday best. These are symbols of survival and urban energy. The theme is affirmed as wise ancients stolidly watch a parade of youthful, uniformed, strutting churchgoers enroute to the pier where they will embark for Bear Mountain, a formerly lush resort fallen on hard times and now surviving on black church picnics.

By now the Hudson has become the Jordan. The music, off and on, sings of redemption, peace, and marching out of Egypt: "Ain't Gonna Study War No More," "I'm Crossing Over Jordan," "Children, Go Where I Send Thee," "Fare Thee Well," and "Hush Storm." We are not merely leaving Harlem; we are abandoning secular cares for an idyllic interlude in the heaven of Christian salvation.

Once on board, Ken Resnick's camera is lulled by the lazy rhythms. Kids dance, oldsters sit and take in the scene, lovers touch lightly. Slowly the controlling (and unconscious) metaphor takes over as the steamer slides under the George Washington Bridge. The sweep and curve of the towers and cables form a parabolic metaphor for the crossing into the promised land, an image that sits like a cat in the back of one's mind, stroked by the song on the sound track. At the instant of creation, the symbol meant little. A blurbwriter for the film said merely that they "cast aside their daily cares to have a good time." The cameraman shot the bridge only as a signal that the ship was under way, but to a recent black audience it was a parable in modern idiom. The ship's innards share in the visual allegory. The pistons, oiled and machined smooth, seem an engine of God driving the chosen people to a new Canaan.

The image is confirmed at Bear Mountain when the old boat sidles up to the ancient and rotting pier. The flock frolics, picnics, and lounges on the grass slopes rolling up from the river. Only the theology seems flawed, for as the outing comes to an end, we know they are not in paradise, but only a respite from the city, a shared and fleeting prophecy of a heaven deferred. They return home to Harlem. Like many allegories, Sunday on the River does not fit in all its parts, but its intimations of a special black paradise promised and withdrawn remains a powerful, unifying image.

Spencer Williams's The Blood of Jesus (1941) lacks Eloise Gist's totally naive faith, St. Claire Bourne's intellectual rigor, and Gordon Hitchens's and Ken Resnick's poetic flair. It does not rest on a hidden allegorical system or objective reportage. It is all surfaces, melodrama and fundamentalist lore, and the viewer can see the stitching at its seams. But it is the best extant example of primitive black religious film unadorned by artifice. In place of the intellectuals' symbolic cosmology the audience sees the black-and-white, good-and-evil, yang-and-yin of Southern black Baptist tradition rendered in melodramatic form on grainy film.

Williams, a great round, brown-skinned man, who hid a humorous streak behind his penetrating eyes, came to Hollywood in the late 1920s after a stint in the Army. He worked in Al Christie comedies as a writer and actor, and appeared in at least one race movie. After a lull during the Depression years, he caught on with Jed Buell and other makers of black westerns (one of which made Time' s movie section), and appeared in "B" movies and exploitation movies such as Richard Kahn's Son of Ingagi. His access to the screen closed only after Ted Toddy's Atlanta-based Dixie National Pictures bought up, standardized, and controlled the flow of race movies.

Sometime in 1940, a fellow Texan, Alfred Sack, asked him to make a few race movies to fill the product shortage brought on by Toddy's oligopoly. One result was The Blood of Jesus, an evangelistic tract in the style of Eloise Gist, but with a melodramatic sense sharpened by Williams's years in Hollywood. Indeed, Williams's achievement may have approximated Gist's goals. Although lacking access to Hollywood's technical crafts, Williams was able to adapt primitive, naive style to melodramatic formula in a way that appealed to both Gist's church-hall audience and the theatrical trade. Sack's brother and co-worker remembered it as the most durable and profitable race movie ever made.

23. Spencer Williams (right) wrote, directed, and starred in The Blood of Jesus. (Courtesy Ken Jacobs)

Williams not only directed The Blood of Jesus but wrote the script and appeared in it as well, along with a crew of well-intentioned black Texas amateurs leavened by Reverend R. L. Robinson's Heavenly Choir. The result was an exemplar of Southern black fundamentalism untrammeled by white intrusion—even by Sack, who provided only money and distribution.

Like a series of Sunday School posters, every image and symbol assumed literal and larger-than-life fundamentalist proportions in a cautionary tale warning the faithful against the sinful life. Upright, decent, bourgeois blacks literally take up the struggle against the forces of the devil. But they are not the heroic masses of a Sergei Eisenstein film; they are more like Hezdrel's forces in the forgotten militant sequences of The Green Pastures. Indeed the inner turmoil of the heroes of virtue is seen not collectively in sweeping shots of masses, but in a manner much like that of Slavko Vorkapich: slow dissolves and multiple images that reveal inner struggles with self. Thus Williams's work sprung from Hollywood tradition. Yet both his remoteness from the white studios and his tight budgets overawed Hollywood style and grounded The Blood of Jesus firmly in uncompromising sources of black Southern piety.

The film opens on a great cross in the clouds which is underlined by traditional black music. An old-fashioned iris carries the eye to a black farmer, then in closer and tighter to rough hands on the plow handles. Like the long crane shot that opens Orson Welles's Touch of Evil, it tells the viewer almost more than he is entitled to know at this early point in the film. But it is a neat device for putting the viewer's eye into the segregated world and for foreshadowing the religious tone that is to dominate. Pulling back, the camera takes in a wide shade tree with two blacks seated under its branches. At last a voiceover explains why we are here.

We intrude on this scene in order to mourn the passing of the great days when Afro-Americans were embraced by a familial certitude that would be later shattered by the great black diaspora from Southern farm to Yankee city. "Those days are almost gone," the voice says. "Almost. ..." In this way we learn that somewhere in the South, a deeply rooted filiopietistic black morality survives as in a down-home Zion held out to urban blacks whose city life has failed them. Not until Gordon Parks's The Learning Tree a quarter of a century later, would a black filmmaker pay such homage to traditional life. Perhaps the urgent, immediate, urbane images of aesthetique du cool that so readily lent themselves to "blaxploitation" were responsible for diverting black attention away from the richness of rural tradition.

Although the viewer does not yet know why, the camera picks up a long queue of singers in Sunday best walking along a dusty road. As we hear "All God's Chillun" and "Amazing Grace" on the sound track, at last we learn that they march toward their baptism in the broad reach of a river. Camera work is poor and lighting unmatched, but the imagery, except for a few evangelical sequences in Hallelujah!, is unlike that in any other American movie. It is a genuinely personal vision of faith untrammeled by art or skill—a true primitive sequence in the art critic's sense of the term.

24. In The Blood of Jesus, an early sequence establishes the religious theme in a series of primitive but remarkably composed figures and spaces, lights and darks, and angular planes formed by a river baptism. (Courtesy, Ken Jacobs)

Coming in tightly, almost as though the camera is standing in the water that has been stirred to muddy opaqueness, we see a pretty young woman receive her baptism with exceptional calm. Cutting away to a pair of gossips, we learn that she is Sister Jackson, new wife to Ras Jackson, who is hunting instead of attending the baptism. In a fleeting cut that foreshadows trouble, we see Ras running from a snake across a dry wash. Once home he admits that his hunt has been not for wild game but a sack full of shoats he has stolen to fill the empty larder. The audience may sense that the snake is an omen of bad tidings, for what good can come to a man stealing on the day of his wife's baptism? In the Jackson's cabin, the young wife pleads without success for Ras to get religion. Drained by the effort, she crawls into bed, under a kitsch Jesus on the wall.

The expected trouble follows shortly. Ras has leaned his shotgun against a chair and it falls of its own weight, firing a blast into his wife's room, striking her. Ras rushes in, sobbing.

The flock hovers over the dying Sister Jackson, with intercuts to Ras which show his remorse as he holds his head in his hands. The sequence becomes a flurry of cuts, from the bed, to the wide-eyed, wounded woman, to the humming flock dressed in white, to the spirit world and the pearly gates where the struggle for a soul will commence. "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" resounds on the sound track as Ras falls, sobbing, to the bed. The saddened flock joins him, first chanting in unison, then in scattered personal pleas for the Sister's salvation. A voiceover sings "Give Me That Old Time Religion." Ras himself begins to sing and looks to heaven. But it is too late. One of the sisters draws the covers over the still form.

From this point in the film, the secular world shares the audience's attention with the world of the spirits. With Sister Jackson apparently dead, we fade out on a series of stylized religious tableaux: a trail winding heavenward, the portrait of Jesus on the wall, the gates of paradise, a shadowy but literal Jacob's ladder, a long-tressed angel superimposed over the bed, lifting the shroud. "This is the end of the trail," a voiceover says as wraiths and spirits lead Sister Jackson to her reward.

Not only have we been lifted out of the constraints of modern skepticism, but Sister Jackson's death becomes the occasion for a recapitulation of the history of her race. Ghostly monuments are built as the race moves forward. The combination of fundamentalism and racial history takes on the texture of a Cecil B. DeMille epic done on a shoestring.

Returning to the secular world, Williams makes Sister Jackson's soul the prize in astruggle between good and evil. As a test, her ghostly figure is again given substance and she is leddown the path to temptation, past the false prophets and hypocrites. Each painterly scene provides a testament to the literal presence of God in combat with Satan. Indeed, Satan appears, garbed appropriately in white, and sends a flashily dressed Judas Green after the woman. "Go ahead Judas, do yo' stuff," he commands. And Judas tempts her with stylish clothes.

"You'll need them in the city," he says, and thus we know that the good rural life stands in sharp contrast with urban decadence. Judas and Sister Jackson go to a saloon, watch a few musical routines, and listen to a driving little band "beat out a little jive." Judas, along with a comrade, plots a wicked course for Sister Jackson, promising to "put [her] to work right away" in a life of sin.

Sister Jackson cries out for mercy and flees, first through darkened doorways, then into open country. Out there, near the good life, the odds shift in her favor. Nearby, a jazz piano plays on the back of a truck in a last tempting gesture, and two hand-painted signs point to either Hell or Zion. The audience knows Sister Jackson is saved when she crawls across the rough land to a cross as the voices of a choir rise in song. Blood drips from the crucifix above as a cut takes us back to her deathbed where we, and the mournful Ras, see her revive. The flock breaks into a hymn praising the miracle of her redemption. The audience can guess that Ras, too, will join the heavenly throng in gratitude for his wife's revivification.

Williams larded the film's ambience with a number of devices that lent textural support to his theme. In order to reinforce the conflict between city and country, for example, he cast the Devil in the style of aesthetique du cool, i.e., as the smooth and oily trickster, the natural enemy of pious country folk. Judas, his messenger, dresses in flashy, cool clothes topped by a rakish fedora and glides with the cool stride of the street hustler—the bête noir of the black bourgeoisie. Like the secular counter-bourgeois images of The Green Pastures that symbolized urban evil, the heavies in Williams's film also haunt saloons crowded with finger-popping jitterbugs, dancers who embrace too closely, and even a woman in white picking a pocket.

25. In The Blood of Jesus, the literal resurrection of Sister Jackson (Cathryn Caviness) from her deathbed results from the prayers of the flock, who stand under the benign portrait of Jesus. (Courtesy Ken Jacobs)

All of the crowded images lead to a single unspoken point. As in black Southern folklore (reaching back to the days when Booker T. Washington founded Tuskegee Institute, and in his Sunday evening talks warned his pupils against going to town on Saturday), rural piety is pitted against urban disingenuousness. For decades, even in slave times, black preachers and teachers had warned their people away from cities. The movie concurs and tries to show that in town, the Devil drives.

26. Like The Blood of Jesus, Williams's Brother Martin featured him as a primitivist-director and actor.

To satisfy those with a faith in a more mechanistic god, the experience of Sister Jackson's miraculous recovery may be taken as a dream that she has shared with the audience. Here Williams performed his own miracle. While wearing his fundamentalism on his sleeve, he also allowed the disbelievers in the audience to accept the story because they can believe that the shot passed cleanly through Sister Jackson. However, this interpretation does not spoil the movie for the devout; for them, it is the true blood of Jesus that drips from the crucifix and the portrait on the wall, thereby symbolizing the power of God to intervene in the earthly affairs of the faithful. Thus last minute rationalism did not deny them their parable.

Such visual evidence suggests that Williams was more than a low-budget DeMille. He reached not for DeMille's audience, or for that of northern race movie makers. He aimed for Eloise Gist's audience in order to draw them out of their southern black church basements into theaters. Williams's religious movies were, for these audiences, simple, direct, and literal with symbols that carried their messages on the surface.

Williams completed the film just before the outbreak of World War II. During the war, a shortage of raw film stock curtailed the production of race movies, thus preventing Williams and Sack from making a sequel. Nevertheless, Williams managed to turn out Marching On, a tribute to black soldiers in the form of an adventure film in which black GI's expose a Japanese spy ring.

But toward the end of the war, Williams returned to religious themes for, as his backer claimed of The Blood of Jesus, it "was possibly the most successful of all the Negro films and lived the longest. . . . and possessed that certain chemistry required by the Negro box office." In 1944 Alfred Sack released Williams's Go Down Death which was "reverently" dedicated to the Afro-American poet James Weldon Johnson, whose poem had inspired the title.

Unfortunately, Williams never recovered the unique formula which he achieved with The Blood of Jesus. The times themselves may have altered the audience. Already on the move out of the rural South, black emigrants were further stimulated by the overheated northern industrial wartime economy. The very primitiveness of Williams's style and imagery was lost on a more urbane audience with access to Hollywood theatrical motion pictures. For years southern black fundamentalists had eschewed commercial movies in favor of films like The Blood of Jesus. Wartime changes in social values loosened their grip on their flocks and their tastes in entertainment. Williams, a born Southerner and a prodigal who returned home to Texas, was probably the last filmmaker to have an audience who could appreciate movies infused with sincere old-fashioned southern piety. Postwar audiences expected more art. To Williams's audiences drawn from old church basements, the fact that his work did not achieve artistic success did not diminish the power of his religious message.

Putting aside such questions of aesthetics and viewing the film only from the point of view of Williams's rural southern audiences, The Blood of Jesus stands as a remarkable if curious genre film. Like any genre film, The Blood of Jesus succeeded in the eyes of its fans even as its detractors scoffed at its lack of artistic pretension or its deviation from even the simplest canons of cinema art. As a genre film The Blood of Jesus emerged from segregated sources and perspectives. It provided a brief anatomy of Southern Baptist folk theology by presenting Christian myth in literal terms that pious fundamentalists could accept. From its opening voiceover, the film became an advocate for the most enduring traditions of Afro-American family life on southern ground. And it succeeded in characterizing the Satanic forces in black counter-bourgeois terms easily understood by the prospective audience—the "bad nigger" of the streets styled in the grand manner of aesthetique du cool. It worked as genre film, if not art.