Thom Andersen, a film historian and documentarian, produced Juke: Passages from the Films of Spencer Williams in 2015 as a commission from the Museum of Modern Art. Andersen's magnum opus is, probably, his three-hour film collating and analyzing footage in Hollywood movies exploiting locations in Los Angeles -- this film is called Los Angeles Plays Itself and is wonderful, engaging, but abstract to the point that I can't recall many details. Backgrounds are background and, although the film is revealing, I don't recall what it reveals. (Early in his career, Andersen married the avant-garde to the public TV documentarian in his film Eadward Muybridge, Zoopraxographer, made in 1975 and a template for many later documentary films by others, most of them made for PBS. Spencer Williams was an African-American director who made very low budget films for a company called SACK. The pictures were shot in rural Texas and, apparently, involve lurid stories involving crime and redemption. The movies were made between 1940 and 1949 -- apparently nine pictures. Williams appears in many of the movies. He was a large fat man who could play grotesquely stereotyped parts as well as comedy -- in one short sequence, he seems to impersonate Oliver Hardy, using pretentious diction as her berates an imbecile side-kick: it's funny and disturbing at the same time. Williams made his films as "Race Movies" for Black audiences and the pictures were probably shown in segregated theaters in the South -- in one shot, we see a movie theater in which everyone, including the usher, is Black. Despite making films for exclusively Black audiences, Williams didn't hesitate to use aggressively caricatured African-American "types" in this movies -- stuff, offensive today, that seems to be even more retrograde than the roles featuring Stepin Fetchit made in the decade before William's work as well as around the same time.
If you want to know about Williams and the weird sociology of his pictures, you will need to look at Wikipedia or some other source. Andersen's concerns are not historical but aesthetic. He wants to demonstrate that this is some kernel of truth concealed in William's idiotic scenarios and grainy, half-invisible pictures. I'm not convinced, but some of the footage is mildly interesting as examples of what Manny Farber, the famous film critic, called "Termite Art" -- this sort of film is not intended as art but exploitation of one kind or another; however, it inadvertently discloses around its margins truths and reality inaccessible to more prestigious, better disciplined and "artistic" films. It's in this light that Andersen interprets Williams ' work. (It's another question as to whether Andersen is, in effect, patronizing Williams by not taking his films on their own tawdry terms -- that is, as dramas about morality, crime, temptation, and redemption. Thom Andersen, who can no doubt cite Walter Benjamin and Adorno with the best of them, doesn't engage with the films or their thematic purposes -- he treats them as artifacts, bits of "primitive" art that we have to re-arrange and isolate into fragments in order to understand (or, more likely, in order to find these things bearable). After some explanatory titles, the film starts with congregations wailing gospel tunes while the camera jerkily tours neighborhoods that are obviously very poor and desolate. The singing is not Gospel Brunch caliber -- instead, the congregations morosely chant the lyrics in a manner that is almost atonal. We see some shabby genteel interiors. A woman walks through a door. Then, there's an insert of a suave hustler, a man talking on the phone who says "Okay, Judas, do your stuff!" (Is this supposed to be God?) There's a shot of a nondescript field with some folks sitting in a pickup truck; some of them may be playing banjos.. A man dressed in devil's costume prances around and, then, hops on the pick-up truck which lurches away. This is followed by scenes in a primitive-looking Juke joint where some obviously non-professional dancers, skinny people with raw, angular faces, are dancing. (Andersen slows their dancing to slow motion.) There are shots of trains that look like stock footage and, then, a funeral in which we see, by superimposition, a woman's soul rising out of her casket and ascending some over-exposed bleached white steps to Heaven. A man named Jim, possibly the murderer of the woman, says that his conscience is tormenting him. He runs desperately through a series of mismatched rural landscapes. There are more people dancing in a Juke Joint to tinny music. One of the women is extremely emaciated and looks like a Black version of Popeye's girlfriend, Olive Oyl. She has bony knees and elbows. A sign stuck in a field has two arrows: one points to Zion and the other to Hell. A woman goes into a sort of tent in which Spencer, wearing a turban, looks into a crystal ball to read her fortune. "You don't wanna know the truth," he says. "You've done something bad." There's a fight, possibly the most incompetently staged in film history. (The punches sound like hiccups as they land.) Williams stands against the wall chortling at the violence. When someone pulls a knife he crushes the man's hand under his shoe and takes away the weapon. A woman gets shot. A man dances like a turtle on his back. Men play conga drums and the final scenes seem to be set in some over-exposed out of focus heaven where white columns and gates hang over the actors dressed in white garments that look like choir robes. "This is the end," we hear, "the unjust have been struck down. The Righteous have been treated with contempt."
The little 20 minutes film is showing on MUBI. The images are of poor quality and the sound is hard to decipher. There's no commentary by Andersen except a couple of brief titles. I looked at some of the viewer's notes posted to the movie. Many of the people who watched the film apparently didn't really see it -- or watched it through some sort of prism of political correctness. Several people noted that Williams was a great director unjustly forgotten because of his race. And these commentators say that they will have to hunt down his films and watch them. But the movies are self-evidently terrible in every respect -- Andersen isn't trying to rejuvenate the reputation of Spencer Williams, a reputation that he never had in the first place. Rather he seems to see the film's as accidentally revealing things about the way that Southern Blacks viewed themselves in the forties, something either deeply depressing or ecstatic depending upon your point of view.
(Williams was born in Louisiana in 1893. Interestingly, he studied at the University of Minnesota and served in World War I. He appeared in several silent films including Steamboat Bill, made by Buster Keaton. He also supervised casting of African-American parts for several studios. SACK studios was located in San Antonio. He is most famous for playing the role of Amos in Amos and Andy. Apparently, he was a gregarious fellow who was always seen with his trademark cigar. He died in 1969 -- periodically critics try to re-evaluate him as a film maker but, generally, come to the same conclusion: objectively considered his films are abysmal.)
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