Laid Low
Ohhh man - it hurts even just to type this note. In short, I have a severe spasm in my neck. It tends to pull my head down to one side. I can't striaghten it up, can't lie down, can't sit up really straight, no position is comfortable. It hurts like hell. At one point my doctor tried to get the head to stand up straight by gently tipping the head into position with his fingertips. The pain was so bad I just bawled.
After a shot for I feel a bit better. I can hold my head up a little, but with some pain. The doc was curious to why I didn't just go to the Emergency room, rather than make an appointment and then wait four hours to see him. Well, my heathcare cost has gone up so much in even just a couple of months that I can't afford the co-pay for an emergency room visit. I'd have to have my head hanging half off to justify that.
In the waiting room I was sobbing like a lady in an old movie with a toothache. But I had my Bible with me and sometimes you can just open it and something jumps out at you that proves helpful. I was lucky today, as it opened to Psalm 70.
The Blood of Jesus
While waiting for my doctor's appointment I popped in my videotape of Spencer Williams' first film "The Blood of Jesus" (1941), a picture I haven't seen in a good, long time. Browsing around on the net later I was disappointed in the critical writing I saw on this film, which tends to focus to much on its low budget milieu and bad acting. Well it may be "bad" to eyes trained by method acting (which, in terms of acting, I see as the highest form of decadence - there is no need for an actor to imagine that they are becoming their character, it negates the craft of it and belittles acting down to mere impersonation), but "The Blood of Jesus" is not a movie - it's part parable, part allegory and part representative of a lost artform belonging to the stage of long ago, the "tableaux vivant." Anyone who condemns "The Blood of Jesus" on the basis of "if Spencer Williams had the same resources that white filmmakers had, he would've made a good movie" has no understanding of the mythos of the African American Baptist church, and how what Williams had to work with, while modest, was sufficient to realize his vision both for him and his audience. Low budget white filmmakers in the religious realm in the1950s worked with similar capital and didn't do nearly as well. "The Blood of Jesus" was produced by a Jewish distributor of exploitation features who provided most of the money for Williams to make the film and didn't interfere with its content.
What I see is a strong continuity of powerful religious imagery, and how a counterpoint is established with the soundtrack, with it's interleaving of Gospel singing, blues songs and jazz. There are shots in the "The Blood of Jesus" which are worthy of Dreyer, but I don't see anyone calling Spencer Williams "the Black Dreyer;" most just refer to his role as "Andy" on the "Amos and Andy" television show. In Williams' vision, icons of Christ directly interact with people in the story and speak to them. The Devil's laughter may seem corny and contrived, but this is stylized acting that fits the kind of story which is being told; a religious fantasy or pageant, not a realistic story in any way. The impoverished, mostly rural locales visit the same kinds of desolate areas that Fellini would later scout out for films like "La Strada." Many, many scenes in "The Blood of Jesus" are surrealistic in a homespun way, and some pulse with a sort of religious ecstacy. Others, such as the shots of the grieving Williams with his head turned in anguish to a corner, or a tracking shot back from a window which has been blacked out in mouring, have a semi-abstract quality that impart a feeling of alienation.
I hope that critics someday will stop judging "The Blood of Jesus" on the same plane as they would a modern film, or even contemporary Hollywood product - it probably cost more to shoot one scene of "The Philadelphia Story" than it did all of "The Blood of Jesus." It should be recorgnized for what it is; a great masterwork of American Folk Art, and a priceless document of the African American Baptist experience unfiltered through the jauncied eye of commercial interests.
Uncle Dave Lewis