Christianity in Film

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Christianity in Film

African Americans have long recognized the power of popular culture and media to help shape the society's views on race. As a result of the explicit intent of the artists and in less conscious ways, popular culture has informed discussions about civil rights, politics, and economics. While literary, theatrical, journalistic, and radio representations of African Americans have been influential, motion pictures have held a particularly prominent place in the American imagination. Film scholars have noted that, from film's earliest days, the appearance of black skin on screen—either on black actors or white actors in blackface makeup—has signaled a complex set of issues about political and social power. The stereotypical images that civil rights activists and film scholars have identified—which generally mark African Americans as lazy, childlike, hypersexual, or superstitious, for example—function to invest race with moral meaning, justifying racial hierarchy. At the same time, black filmmakers have also used the medium to explore artistic, social, and political issues of importance in ways that do not rely on those stereotypes.

Representations of African-American religious beliefs and practices have been featured prominently in many early, Hollywood, and more recent independent films that focus on African-American life or feature African-American characters. The appearance of this subject matter over time reflects in part the historical and contemporary significance of religion for many African Americans, both in institutional forms and as a component of individual identity. Film historian Thomas Cripps argues that films about religion made by African Americans for black audiences constitute a distinct genre, and he notes that, "No other genre, except perhaps the American western, spoke so directly to the meaning and importance of shared values embraced by its audience (1996, p. 12)." In addition to this small subset of black religious films, one finds explorations of black religion across an assortment of genres. This variety points to the way in which African-American religion in film has provided an imaginative arena to explore a broad range of topics, including politics, class, skin color, regional issues, gender, and theology.

Early Black Film

Film historians often cite white director D. W. Griffith's 1915 film The Birth of a Nation as transformative because of its compelling visuals and sophisticated use of cinema as a medium for storytelling. Griffith's extremely popular work, which was based on Thomas W. Dixon's 1905 novel The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, is also significant in film history because it made clear the utility of cinema to locate Christian white supremacy as the basis of American identity. Outraged by the racism and violence of the film, African Americans and concerned whites in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People mounted an unsuccessful campaign to halt its exhibition in a number of cities. In addition to protesting formally, African Americans addressed the troubling perspective advanced in The Birth of a Nation by presenting alternative visions on film and, in a number of cases, their cinematic responses spoke to the religious implications of Griffith's perspective. In 1920 black director Oscar Micheaux, who produced almost forty films in the silent and sound eras, released Within Our Gates, which tells the story of Sylvia Landry, a black teacher in a southern school for black children. Responding to Griffith's justification of segregation and of Ku Klux Klan lynchings as necessary tools to restore the divinely ordained glory of the white nation, Micheaux presented a story of racial violence from the perspective of innocent and upstanding African Americans who seek nothing more than just pay for their labor and fair treatment as citizens. In addition to his critique of racial violence directed at African Americans, Micheaux directed his attention to questions of what African Americans at the time termed "racial uplift"—strategies for political, economic, and social development that would enable blacks to claim the full rights of citizenship.

Religious leadership proved an important part of Micheaux's vision, and Within Our Gates argues—through the character of Old Ned—that uneducated and manipulative ministers threaten black progress by diverting attention from more significant issues toward an unproductive quest for reward in heaven. Micheaux presented a similar and even more dangerous character in his 1925 Body and Soul in which Paul Robeson stars as the greedy, manipulative, and violent Rev. Isaiah Jenkins, whose reign of terror is enabled by the utter devotion of the congregation's women. While Micheaux called into question the frequent reliance of African Americans on clergy for leadership, he still provided a place for religion, and Christianity in particular, in racial uplift. Micheaux's theological response to Griffith's Christian white supremacy was to argue, through the character of Dr. V. Vivian in Within Our Gates, a model of appropriate commitment to racial uplift, that Christianity insists on racial equality and human rights for all.

The Birth of a Race (1919), directed by John W. Noble, responded directly to the religious implications of The Birth of a Nation. Although the film's title might lead viewers to expect a film that focuses on African-American achievements, The Birth of a Race 's approach to countering Griffith's presentation of the American nation as fundamentally Anglo-Saxon instead relates the history of the human race, using the Bible as its source. The film narrates the birth and development of humanity as a product of God's desire for peace. Produced in the shadow of World War I, Noble's film presents America's sacred history as a divinely ordained development of biblical sacred history and endorses African-American participation in the war, which it sees as benefiting "the Cause of Mankind" and God's ultimate desire for peace.

Later "race films"—intended for black audiences and produced by independent black filmmakers or in cooperation with white production companies—provide evidence that these artists were concerned about the past and future place of black religious institutions and their leaders in light of the social changes brought on by urbanization and the Great Migration. Some of these films are devotional and were produced from an explicitly religious perspective in an effort to evangelize and instruct about the dangers of the modern secular world. Others sought to provide a critique of black religious leadership, and yet other films simply included religious themes because black audiences found the familiar material entertaining.

Among the devotional films produced before 1950, those of African-American directors Eloyce King Patrick Gist and James Gist stand out as particularly geared toward engaging the viewer in an explicitly religious mode. Two of their surviving silent films made in the mid-1930s—Hell-Bound Train (c. 1929–1930) and Verdict Not Guilty (c. 1930–1933) focus on demonstrating the potential consequences for Christians of participation in worldly and sinful activities. In Verdict Not Guilty a woman's soul is brought before a heavenly court to answer for behavior during her life. While found innocent, she is subjected to Satan's attempts to claim her for himself by characterizing her as an irredeemable sinner. Similarly, in Hell-Bound Train the Gists presented their audience with examples of behaviors that they believed would lead the individual to hell, including gambling, drinking, dancing, listening to jazz music, abortion, and adultery.

African-American director Spencer Williams's films from the 1940s engaged many of the same themes as those found in the Gists' films but set the moral and religious messages in a variety of generic contexts, including melodrama, comedy, and musical. Two of his religious melodramas—The Blood of Jesus (1941) and Go Down, Death (1944)—pit devout churchwomen against the attempts of scheming men who scorn religion. In both cases religion triumphs in the end. Both films are also characterized by Williams's superimposition of one image over another to make present a variety of divine and demonic figures who interact with and attempt to influence the human characters. Even in a comedy, such as Dirty Gertie from Harlem, U.S.A. (1946), Williams engaged religious themes and provided a cautionary tale for viewers. A reworking of W. Somerset Maugham's 1924 story "Miss Thompson," Dirty Gertie interrogates the moral fortitude of black clergy, presenting Rev. Jonathan Christian as a sanctimonious and prim man who finds he cannot resist his desire for a nightclub dancer.

Hollywood Films

Representations of African and African-American religion have been common in Hollywood films, which have often characterized these beliefs and practices as savage, superstitious,

hysterical, or childlike. During the heyday of the studio system, Hollywood films frequently made use of images of African-derived and African-American religion to evoke laughter or terror and sometimes both within the same narrative. Vitaphone Varieties' short silent comedy Revival Day with Slim Timblin (1930), for example, takes the viewer into the world of the black church and lampoons the preaching styles and comportment of black ministers, using a white actor in blackface makeup in the lead role. Hal Roach's film The Little Sinner (1935), a short in the Our Gang series, relies for its comedy on a white character's terror in response to seeing members of a black congregation's river baptism. A scene in the Marx Brothers' A Day at the Races (1937) also enlists African-American religious culture in its humor, presenting black culture as authentic and joyful when set against the pretensions of wealthy whites. During this same period, film audiences frequently saw adventure films that focused on a white explorer's encounter with savage black jungle peoples whose superstitious practices mark them as a danger to white civilization. Whether set in Africa or in the Caribbean, such films typically revolved around the rescue of a white woman from rape, cannibalism, or the threat of her surrender to "voodoo" or paganism. Trader Horn (1931), White Zombie (1932), Kongo (1932), King Kong (1933), Black Moon (1934), and I Walked with a Zombie (1943) typify such early films. Although they are set in contexts far from the United States, American ideas about the moral valence of race, which equates blackness with evil, informed these adventure films. Similar approaches to African-derived religions are present in later Hollywood films such as The Believers (1987), Angel Heart (1987), and The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988). These movies promote the view that the African-derived religions of vodou and Santería are profoundly dangerous and, as with the earlier generation of films, attempted to speak to the particular historical moment and to fears about African and Caribbean immigrants to the United States.

On a number of significant occasions in its early years, Hollywood turned its attention to "all-black cast" films, spurred on by the idea that black religious music, particularly spirituals, provided the best material to demonstrate the wonders of the new sound technology. In 1929 Fox released Hearts in Dixie and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Hallelujah, the first all-black cast Hollywood films. Even after sound had become a routine part of the movies, the studios continued to be interested in all-black cast films set in religious contexts. Warner Brothers followed in 1936 with a film adaptation of Marc Connelly's Pulitzer Prize–winning play, The Green Pastures, an attempt to present a black version of the Hebrew Scriptures, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer returned again in 1943 with Cabin in the Sky, also adapted from a Broadway show. While novel in the context of Hollywood because of their use of black casts, these films nevertheless attempted to fix African Americans in an imagined untroubled rural past, failing to note economic exploitation, racial violence, or political disfranchisement. Each of these early all-black cast films employed images of simple or superstitious black religion as a sign that the black masses were suited to a subordinate economic, political, and moral standing in America. These patterns held true in later films, even when the focus was not on an imagined all-black context.

Contemporary Film

Hollywood's representational traditions of black religion had a long-term impact, and the absence of religious themes in later films by black filmmakers may be attributed, in part, to this legacy. The writers and directors of the male-oriented new black independent cinema of the 1980s and 1990s, for example, showed little interest in exploring religious belief and practice in their art. Spike Lee's 1992 biographical film, Malcolm X, engaged Malcolm's religious beliefs only briefly and, in charting his movement out of the Nation of Islam, emphasized political over equally important theological motivations. A number of films directed by black and white directors in the 1990s and early 2000s did take the opportunity to engage religious themes in ways that charted new territory with regard to the representation of black religious life. Charles Burnett's To Sleep with Anger (1990) is set in Los Angeles but presents a family with roots deep in the South and for whom belief in conjure—African-derived magical practices—remains strong. Julie Dash's 1991 Daughters of the Dust also concerns itself with conjure traditions among the Gullah people of the Sea Islands but uses the medium in novel ways in her attempt to represent African sensibilities about memory, time, and place. In addition, Dash's work stands out because of her focus on African-American women's religious sensibilities as central to the formation of collective identity. Eve's Bayou (1997), written and directed by Kasi Lemmons, also interweaves magic into its exploration of secrets and family dynamics in 1960s New Orleans. A number of films in the period returned to explore the significance of Christianity for African Americans. In 1992 actor Blair Underwood directed The Second Coming, a short film in which he stars as a modern-day Jesus who is judged insane for declaring himself the son of God. The film takes on the contested issue of representing the race of the historical Jesus, as well as poses questions about how to make the Christian message relevant in modern times. White actor, writer, and director Robert Duvall, in his 1997 independent film The Apostle, surrounds white Pentecostal preacher Sonny Dewey with a largely black congregation in his search for personal redemption. Avoiding both the conventional Hollywood stereotypes of revivalist preachers and of black congregations, Duvall's work proved effective in imagining a religious landscape in which people engage each other's deep human frailties.

The increasing presence of African Americans behind the camera in Hollywood and in independent film, coupled with the interest among white directors familiar with black religion in presenting stories about African-American religious life, makes it likely that audiences will have access to a broader range of representations and more complex examinations of black religion in American film in the twenty-first century.

Bibliography

Bowser, Pearl, Jane Gaines, and Charles Musser, eds. Oscar Micheaux and His Circle: African-American Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.

Cripps, Thomas. "The Making of The Birth of a Race: The Emerging Politics of Identity in Silent Movies." In The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of U.S. Cinema, edited by Daniel Bernardi. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996.

Snead, James. White Screens, Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side. Edited by Colin MacCabe and Cornel West. New York and London: Routledge, 1994.

Weisenfeld, Judith. "For the Cause of Mankind: The Bible, Racial Uplift, and Early Race Movies." In African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Text and Social Texture, edited by Vincent Wimbush. New York: Continuum, 2002.

Weisenfeld, Judith. "Saturday Sinners and Sunday Saints: The Nightclub as Urban Menace in 1940s Race Movies." In Faith in the Market: Religion and The Rise of Urban Commercial Culture, edited by John Giggie and Diane Winston. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002.

Weisenfeld, Judith. "'My Story Begins Before I Was Born': Myth, History, and Power in Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust." In Representing Religion in World Cinema: Filmmaking, Mythmaking, Culture Making, edited by S. Brent Plate. New York: Palgrave, 2003.