I began by essaying a recent history—hurricane Katrina, its harm, and the threat it poses to New Orleans culture, including film production—and that is a history that for some is bitter, especially as it involves people, black Americans, the descendants of Africans who had been made into slaves, and who have suffered often before. There is a history that is more bitter than the recent history of New Orleans—it is hateful; and it may be beyond hate, occurring in an atmosphere cold and cruel enough that no known human motivation or response can match it: an atmosphere that can be achieved only if one turns away from it, emotionally, morally, spiritually, even as one works physically to make that atmosphere possible. I am thinking now of Africa; and of Belgium’s King Leopold II’s role in the Congo, as presented by the film Congo: White King, Red Rubber, Black Death, which I saw at a small Greenwich Village mid-October screening for journalists. Minutes after seeing the film I described it as informative and intense. The film, directed by Peter Bate, is a documentary with some formal recitations and dramatizations; and it is not art and, despite a few scenes of nature (forest, lake, sunset), it is seldom beautiful, but it is necessary and disturbing. Why do I think it’s necessary? I have spent more time than I want to admit thinking about politics and the skills and talents, promise, vulnerability, and errors of black people, and I used to hear several of WBAI radio’s commentators referring to the legacy of Leopold and I just thought, This is more whining about the past—why don’t these people deal with the problems of today and the responsibilities Africans and African-Americans have for their (our) own lives? The film reminds me that history can be such that generations suffer—and benefit.

What occurs in the documentary or docu-drama—what is talked about, what is reenacted—begins in the nineteenth century. The film, a British-Belgium production, begins with photos taken by Christian missionaries of mutilated children, black children draped in white and photographed against white backgrounds so we can see easily the limbs that have been cut off them, limbs cut as punishment for not meeting work quotas and kept as proof of punishment (severed hands were smoked and presented to authorities). It’s estimated that about ten million Africans died between 1885 and 1908 under King Leopold II’s administration of the Congo. We are told that this was part of Leopold’s quest for wealth, which he got mainly through cultivating rubber for bicycles and cars. Some of the imagery is grainy, and some of it is wavering, which indicates it may have been shot on or transferred from video. The Congo, its wild rubber and the people who worked it—we see men cutting branches from which drips a quick, heavy sap—was thought of as black gold. One missionary, Joseph Clark, is quoted saying he saw things that made him wish he were dead.

We see the Belgian king—an impersonator of the king—sitting in a glass cage in a courtroom; and the film is narrated by Nick Fraser in a voice full of feeling—anger, sympathy, more, as the case against the king is made—and, whereas a few critics have thought the case possibly too emphatic and the narration too emotional, I do not. I think that the people who are upset—including missionaries, journalists, academics—are the people who should be: Europeans, white people, as so much of this history was conducted in their name, for their benefit past and present. (In 1903, one newspaper article wondered if King Leopold II should be hanged for his crimes against humanity.) The truth of what Leopold did was disguised while he lived with talk of the civilization and Christianity he was bringing to the Africans. The principal black African historian in the film, Elikia M’Bokolo, who works in Paris, is calm—he grew up with this history; and is not surprised by it—and knows what his own angry words are likely to accomplish; and thus Elikia M’Bokolo carefully and logically discusses the facts and what they mean as he tours Africa and Brussels. The architecture—the very city of Brussels—that Leopold’s wealth made possible still stands; and in the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Brussels, and in other monuments in Brussels, white conquest was made mythic and Leopold’s death did nothing significant to change that. One of the museum directors says that “none of the colonial powers were softies,” and that one has to consider what was done in the perspective of history. We see bound, shackled, shamed Africans; and are told that young Africans pulled down one of Leopold’s statues—Leopold on a horse—in the Congo, though even in the Congo Leopold’s legacy is not entirely damned (while one old African describes Leopold and his men as very mean, another describes Leopold as an uncle who brought civilization). One forgets the positive claims when one hears the documented stories of women being held hostage so their men would work and of women not only raped but having their breasts and genitals cut out, and of men, women, and children being killed on whim. Who would authorize this brutality?

We are told that King Leopold II, though connected to other European royal families, felt the insecurity of his country and of himself as an indifferently brought up child; and Leopold saw having a colony as essential to Belgium’s prospects. Apparently, by the late nineteenth century, while other European countries thought that some of the profits should be re-invested in their colonies, Leopold wanted most of that profit exported. He used an explorer and creator/destroyer named Henry Morton Stanley, who created a network of steamers and bridges, and villages were burned and natives killed. Stanley used bribes and tricks to get chiefs to sign treaties giving Leopold ownership of land, using the English and early American deception of the Native Americans as a model. A corporation that had been nonprofit and supposedly humanitarian was quickly replaced by a for-profit entity. Belgium triumphed at the Berlin Conference, promising other countries an access to the Congo they did not get; and Leopold passed regulations declaring not only vacant land but all produce belonged to the Congo Free State, that is to Leopold and Belgium. There were a lot of nighttime ambushes and murders of villagers who would not comply with rules or quotas; and one village was destroyed—the villagers killed—because they did not bring their produce in on one day. When soldiers were given bullets they were told to kill men as well as women, and they took male genitals as souvenirs to prove their killing of men, as to account for their use of bullets, they cut off hands, one hand per bullet. True horror—and Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness was inspired by what he saw in the Congo. One man in the film asks, “If you want to fight the white man, where do you get the power?”

Leopold began to be criticized, and several of his critics were men who were at first enthusiastic about his plans for Africa, and one of them was George Washington Williams, says Adam Hochschild in the book King Leopold’s Ghost. George Washington Williams was a black American, and he had been in the Union Army then in the United States (U.S.) Army and had studied at Howard University and the Newton Theological Institution, founded a black newspaper, and wrote a book, History of the Negro Race, admired by W.E. B. DuBois. Williams also was considered a not always trustworthy chameleon by some people, but after meeting Leopold and before including others in a venture in the Congo, which was more than seventy times the size of Belgium, Williams, forty-years old, visited the Congo in 1890, and outraged by what he found, he wrote an Open Letter to Leopold, which was circulated as a pamphlet, and in that he criticized the use of technology to intimidate tribal chiefs, called Stanley’s behavior rude and immoral, noted the lack of promised hospitals and schools and translators of the African languages, and called Leopold a participant in the slave trade. George Washington Williams also wrote A Report upon the Congo State for the U.S. president. His embroidered biography—he claimed to be a colonel but wasn’t—was used against him. Williams died a year after his Congo visit, in 1891, of tuberculosis (King Leopold’s Ghost, Mariner, 1999; 101-114).

William Sheppard, a young black Virginia-born Presbyterian missionary, arrived in the Congo in 1890, and proved himself to all observers a capable and good man, and a good hunter and talker who learned the language of the self-sufficient people he dealt with, the Kuba, who had managed to keep themselves secluded from strangers; and Sheppard appreciated their culture, studying their myths, rituals, crops, and sculpture (King Leopold’s Ghost, 152-158). In 1899, Sheppard, while traveling into the bush to identify the cause of reputed fighting, came face to face with the hand-cutting and smoking of hands, and wrote about that for a missionary publication (164-166). Some missionaries were fined or jailed for working against Congo state officials. In January 1908, Sheppard described for a missionary publication circulated in the U.S. the effect of Leopold’s practices on the Kuba, first describing a very civilized people, before contact with Leopold’s industry: “These magnificent people, perhaps about 400,000 in number, have entered a new chapter in the history of their tribe. Only a few years ago, travelers through this country found them living in large homes, having from one to four rooms in each house, loving and living happily with their wives and children, one of the most prosperous and intelligent of all African tribes.” Then, after their contact with the barbarity of Leopold’s industry: “Within these last three years how changed they are! Their farms are growing up in weeds and jungle, their king is practically a slave, their houses now are mostly half-built single rooms and are much neglected. The streets of their towns are not clean and well-swept as they once were. Even their children cry for bread.” Why was this? “There are armed sentries of chartered trading companies who force the men and women to spend most of their days and nights in the forests making rubber, and the price they receive is so meager that they cannot live upon it” (259-265). Sheppard was taken to court for his article, on the charge of libel, but he was found innocent.

One journalist made telling the truth about the Congo his life mission, Edmund Dene Morel, according to the film Congo: White King, Red Rubber, Black Death. Leopold was angered by the criticism, though aware that atrocities were being committed. Leopold, despite the criticism, implemented bonuses to managers and soldiers for productivity, but it is not until a white trader was killed that Europeans become seriously concerned, though what will stop Leopold is the competition from Asia and South America’s developing rubber industries. (Antwerp, the Belgian town where the Congolese rubber arrived, was actually named for a competition between a giant who cut off hands and a Roman: and one of the chocolate stores makes tiny chocolate hands, which the African historian M’Bokolo buys and looks at. It is a sign that many Belgians do not connect their history—honestly—with the Congo. Cut hands cannot be a benign symbol if knowledge is whole.)

The young Edmund Morel, who had been involved in the Liverpool shipping business and journalism, and sometimes in the late 1890s visited Belgium, called Leopold’s Congolese system a secret society of murderers and worked to provide a thorough analysis of that system, intending to prove that the cruelty involved was not an exception nor the work of a few bad men but the very nature of the system at work, a project another man, Roger Casement, an Irishman and a British civil servant long familiar with the Congo, would achieve with his own report, says the film’s narrator Nick Fraser. Morel, as part of his shipping work, had noticed: the shady-looking personnel involved with Leopold’s business, large shipments of guns, a surplus of imported rubber and ivory valued at tens of millions of dollars and unaccounted for in the paperwork, and few exports to Africa to suggest trade or payment for the imports, according to the book King Leopold’s Ghost (177-181). Casement had read Morel’s work and the two men met in 1903 before the Foreign Office published Casement’s report of his own investigations in the Congo. The film tells us that Morel’s newspaper focused on the Congo, but had found some difficulty garnering evidence and support, as many of the missionaries who saw much of what was going on in Africa were more concerned with African souls than African bodies. Casement encouraged Morel to start an organization to advance justice in the Congo. Morel’s activities—institutionalized in the Congo Reform Association—are considered the first human rights movement of the twentieth century.

The film’s narrative sometimes seems fragmented and redundant, but the impact of what we are told does not lessen: Leopold had private property in the Congo that was ten times the size of Belgium, called the Crown Domain. Reports of brutality there and elsewhere grew: accounts of women sliced in half; accounts of acts of incest demanded by Belgians for their own amusement. Facing complaints, Leopold sent a commission he expected to absolve him and his country, but thanks to brave Africans and some willing missionaries irrefutable testimony and proof were provided (one chief who testified about his decimated village later was tortured to death); and Leopold’s governor-general committed suicide. (It seems the publicity rather than his responsibility shamed him.) Leopold ordered the burning of records of his activities; and records were burnt, but by then his affairs in Africa had become scandalous. The profit King Leopold II gained from his exploitation of the Congo has been estimated as 220 million francs (1.1 billion dollars). The Congo became a Belgian colony in 1908 (until its fought-for independence in 1960), and Leopold was no longer its principal administrator; and after he died, some people booed his funeral procession, but as the years passed, there began a positive rewriting of his history, with some diminishment of the reputations of the men, such as Casement and Morel, who had criticized Leopold. Casement, on behalf of Ireland, was willing to side with Germany during the last century’s first world war if it meant Irish freedom, and he was tried and hanged for treason. Morel was sentenced to six months of hard labor for his own anti-war activity, and came out of detention frail and with white hair, but he was elected to the House of Commons, and died at age fifty-one in 1924. Books such as Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost (Houghton Mifflin/Mariner, Boston and NY, 1998/1999) and The Congo: From Leopold to Kabila (Zed Books, London and NY, 2002) tell the truth, but films are accepted with an immediacy and urgency not now given to books.

Someone in the film repeats a well-known aphorism about how when the Europeans arrived in Africa, they had the Bible and the Africans had the land, and after the Europeans came the Europeans had the land and the Africans the Bible. Congo: White King, Red Rubber, Black Death—its images, its rhetoric, its facts—is persuasive and one is glad to know the history even as one is chastened by it, angered and saddened by it: rage is infectious. Rage is infectious; and the present requires attention. Though Leopold’s legacy remains, and reparations must be made and paid, the man is gone—that life is over. It is finished.

The Gospel surprised me: it’s not a bad movie. Written and directed by Rob Hardy, who directed Chocolate City, about a black college student, and Trois, about a couple involved in a ménage a trois, Hardy’s film The Gospel is story of love—between: father and son; touring musician and local single mother; husband and wife; people and church; a man and music—and it is also a musical drama that constitutes a spiritual journey. I resisted seeing The Gospel, the most recent of my film viewing, just as I had resisted—and have not yet seen—Craig Brewer’s Hustle and Flow, in which Terrence Howard stars as young man who works as a pimp and wants to be a rapper, and David LaChapelle’s Rize, about a youth dance movement connected to clowning and contemporary music: the films seemed to be about clichés of blackness: religion, crime, entertainment, and the street. Having no religious faith, I also did not want to be preached at; and I tend to think that the answers the church gives are not fit for modern life, which often calls for new knowledge, making art, philosophy, and science more useful. How does one receive a work that is different from one’s own philosophy?

The Gospel stars Boris Kodjoe as David Taylor, Idris Elba as Frank, David’s boyhood friend and adult rival, Clifton Powell as Bishop Fred Taylor and David’s father, Nona Gaye as Charlene, Frank’s wife and David’s cousin, and Tamyra Gray as Rain, the single mother David befriends and dates, Aloma Wright as Miss Ernestine, one of the church sisters, and Omar Gooding as Wesley, David’s manager-producer. The music performances pulsate with color, intensity, pageantry, and rhythm. Well-known singers of gospel songs such as Yolanda Adams and Fred Hammond appear as themselves; and Adams is great singing “(I’ve got the) Victory.” I think the acting is generally good, though there are a few times when it seems shaky or stiff; and, in fact, there is an unusual amount of perceptible conviction on the screen. The supporting parts are excellently cast: the faces are the kind one sees or expects to see in church and peopling the community. The principal actors, female and male, are attractive, as are the landscapes and interiors, while seeming genuine, places people walk, drive, work, and live. There are long scenes in which relationships are allowed to express themselves and evolve; and also the competent, and even entertaining, use of montage, cross-cutting between story-lines, and partitioning of the screen into three or four parts for the depiction of sequential and complementary and differing actions. The Gospel’s cinematographer Matthew MacCarthy worked on one of Rob Hardy’s films, Pandora’s Box, and the editor Fernando Villena edited a Ben Harper live concert video and the film Rize. There were only a few (very few) scenes when I questioned the intention or tone of a film image; and I think the director uses the resources of film to tell the story of a bishop and his family and congregation well.

It’s wonderful to see Clifton Powell as the dedicated Atlanta pastor, Bishop Fred Taylor, a man whose mission is genuine and contributions appreciated, though he knows the limits of time, body, and understanding. Powell had appeared as the child abuser in Woman, Thou Art Loosed; and he has also appeared in Alphabet City, House Party, Deep Cover, Menace II Society, Dead Presidents, Why Do Fools Fall in Love, Rush Hour, The Brothers, and Ray, and in the television films Selma, Lord, Selma, as Martin Luther King Jr., and Having Our Say. Clifton Powell as Bishop Taylor is a central focus and motivating factor in the film: when the bishop is away on church business, his wife gets sick and dies and his son David faults his absence and leaves the church to become a successful entertainer selling sexy songs. Fifteen years later, the bishop’s church faces a financial crisis, just as the bishop faces a health crisis. When the pastor becomes ill, David returns and slowly gets involved with his father’s church again; and there are church squabbles between David and his former friend Frank and also between Frank and another minister (Donnie McClurkin), squabbles about mission, pride, purity, and sacrifice. The bishop has designated Frank as his successor in the pulpit. I liked the scene in which David visits his father in the hospital and we see not the adult contemporary David walking down the hall, but the younger David walking down the hall, and we know David’s reliving his mother’s illness and fearing the same fatal outcome with his father.

The young David was effectively played by Michael J. Pagan, and the older David, fifteen years later but still a young man, is played by Boris Kodjoe. Boris Kodjoe was born in Vienna, Austria, to a German psychologist mother and a Ghanaian physician father; and Kodjoe attended, on a tennis scholarship, Virginia Commonwealth University, joined the Ford modeling agency and did campaigns for Ralph Lauren and Yves Saint Laurent and was photographed by Matthew Rolston and Herb Ritts, before making his film debut in Love & Basketball. He went on to appear in Brown Sugar and has been a regular on the television series “Soul Food.” Boris Kodjoe’s character in The Gospel faces recognizable dilemmas: public expectations versus private, and material profit versus spiritual profit. Boris Kodjoe is matched by Idris Elba (actually, Elba is now the better, deeper actor); and these two actors of direct African ancestry, Kodjoe, who looks like a bronze idol, and Elba, who has animal magnetism, could become stellar attractions. Idris Elba plays the mature Frank, reserved but self-assured, with a sense of potential danger, whereas Sean Nelson played the young Frank, who was grinning and sweet. Some of Idris Elba’s early scenes are best, such as when Frank, now one of the church’s ministers, shyly, pleasantly, almost shamefacedly, asks the bishop about how people might see the bishop’s secular son David’s church involvement. Idris Elba, born in London, the son of a Sierra Leone father and Ghanaian mother, has appeared in the films Beautiful Mother and Buffalo Soldiers, and in several television films and serials, including Sometimes in April, about the genocide in Rwanda; and, for two years, Elba was in the series “The Wire,” where he played Stringer Bell, and he was previously in “Family Affairs” and “Bramwell,” two television serials.

Nona Gaye as Charlene is at first happy to see the return of her cousin David, but as time goes on she changes—she’s disapproving of his bribing kids to go to church, by accepting their demonstration recordings when they attend; and she wants to protect her husband from the professional threat David embodies as the pastor’s son—and she becomes self-righteous, scheming. She and her husband Frank also have some marriage trouble, at first unexplained, involving their sex life and his desire for children and her inability to have them. When Charlene circulates a newspaper article about a music contract dispute involving David, Frank—after he himself is talked to by Miss Ernestine—reprimands Charlene, and Charlene says that she can tolerate Frank’s arrogance but not his hypocrisy. By the end of the film, Charlene is an obviously complex figure; and Nona Gaye—the daughter of Marvin Gaye; and an actress featured in Harlem Nights, Ali, The Matrix: Reloaded and Revolutions, and Crash—brings Charlene to life: her smile is charming and warm, her doubt is vivid, and her scowl is frightening. Tamyra Gray conveyed both self-respect and vulnerability as the single-mother; and Aloma Wright was entirely believable as a regular church worker, pious and practical; and Omar Gooding was also convincing as a music business personality—he seemed glib and materialistic though friendly and somewhat well-intentioned. One of the things I liked about the film is that there are no villains—not one of the characters commits an act of pure malice or an act that vitally damages or kills another person—and their being good people does not mean they lack complexity, strength, or threat, and there is conflict among them, even intense conflict involving ambition, misunderstanding, and resentment, but these are basically good men and women.

Kevin Thomas began his October 7, 2005 Los Angeles Times review by stating, “Rob Hardy’s The Gospel is another solid entry in the burgeoning African American faith-based genre that favors inclusiveness over preachiness and presents multidimensional characters. Featuring a number of noted gospel singers, The Gospel is rousing, affirmative entertainment,” and, after a brief description of the plot, Thomas concluded, “The Gospel earns its emotional impact, and Kodjoe has a star’s presence.”

In his own October 7, 2005 review in the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert wrote, “It is not a particularly religious movie; the characters are believers, but the movie is not so much about faith and prayer as about the economic and social function of a church: How it operates as a stabilizing force, a stage for personalities, an arena for power struggles, and an enterprise which must cover its costs or go out of business.” Ebert, after noting that he found the gospel music the best he’s heard on film since Say Amen Somebody, detailed the plot, and commended the director on his knowledge of black church services (some of which Ebert has attended).

The film, which opened nationally on October 7, was typically reviewed on that date. The Chicago Tribune’s Michael Wilmington, who found the story familiar and even predictable, wrote in his October review that the film is “a likable movie done with verve and style. It’s descended at least partly from alternative religious movies, a thriving genre going all the way back to Spencer Williams Jr.’s amazing 1941 low-budget The Blood of Jesus, a ferocious little indie religious movie drama that became a soul circuit legend and is now in the Library of Congress collection. But this movie is far glossier than its predecessors, the actors are better looking and more natural and the treatment so professional that the movie sometimes seems too slick for its own good.”

The other critical attention the film has received has surprised me: a lot of it has been bad. The New York Post compared it to a Sunday-school instructional film, The Chicago Reader said that the film’s positive tone means the story lines cannot rival the vital music, and Ty Burr in The Boston Globe called it a heartfelt but muddled drama with overly active musical numbers. The Boston Globe’s Ty Burr also said in his October 7 review, “A little character ambiguity is a good thing, but Hardy’s screenplay is just confused; by the end, you’re not sure how you’re supposed to feel about any of these people other than that they’re all good souls at heart. Nice message, problematic storytelling, and when The Gospel brings on real-life gospel stars like Yolanda Adams and Fred Hammond, the sonic explosion is tinged with a sense of relief. The movie’s worth seeing if you’re moved by the music, but bring some patience, too. God’s eye is on the sparrow when it should have been on the script.” Why does the reviewer need the film to tell him how he’s supposed to feel? I think it’s interesting that ambiguity is expected or tolerated when dealing with secular independent or particularly intelligent Hollywood films, but not here. I thought it was telling that there were moments during the film when I began to anticipate the characters’ villainy—and began to be disappointed by that development—and then was led to see more in the characters: sometimes, in life, there are moments when good people appear villainous, until you learn more about them.

Some people make a distinction between a film review and film criticism—and I think that criticism offers evaluation but also tribute and elucidation, and that it can offer journalism and history and even philosophy and biography. I think Roger Ebert—who has written books on classic films in addition to writing his newspaper columns and giving short reviews on television—has produced criticism in his response to The Gospel, and I was glad for him to tell me who the soulful white gospel singer in the film was (Martha Munizzi) and that Tamyra Gray had appeared on the television competition “American Idol,” which I had not seen, and I liked his detailed description of the choirs he has observed. Michael Wilmington’s reference to the film The Blood of Jesus was also interesting. I understood—and accept, though I do not agree with—Ty Burr’s complaint regarding the film’s characterizations. However, I thought a genuine failure of film criticism occurred in the New York Times’s review of The Gospel.

Laura Kern, in the October 7, 2005 New York Times, wrote that the film “endeavors to be a powerful tale of faith and forgiveness, but in the end fails to capture even the slightest essence of spirituality and religious belief, or to provide any real insight into its characters’ conflicts, desires and motivations,” and that “when not in song, the words that come out of the frustratingly undefined characters’ mouths are mostly awkward and contribute to the film’s overall incoherent narrative.” One can sense a person’s spirituality in his or her manner and speech, and observe spirituality in people’s deeds and treatment of others—and for that reason Bishop Taylor’s dedication to his church and being often away from home are both important, and how Frank handles his own ambition for the church and relates to his wife’s insecurity—tender and thoughtful, or demanding and mocking—is also important. I think that to get anything from what we are shown we have to pay attention—and Kern’s stating that the film “fails to capture even the slightest essence of spirituality and religious belief” suggests she did not do that. The consistency with which most reviewers describe the film’s plot and characters suggest that these are coherent—understandable, logical in the film’s terms. Kern concluded her review with the statement that, “The Gospel only scratches the surface of some topics worthy of exploration, like the connection between gospel music and pop music and the workings of the church and show business, which share similar political, showmanship and ego issues. Unlike actual soulful and infectious live church services, this muddled film probably won’t inspire people to jump out of their seats.” It would be useful to have the reviewer specify the issues—the questions or suggestions—she has in mind, not simply gesture in their direction. We also do not see, in the film, how the church responds to real world issues such as the request for female leadership, the fact of homosexuality, the importance of secular politics, or the concerns for food or housing of its neediest members. However, a film has depth not only if ideas or good dialog is presented but if the actors bring emotional understanding to their lines, and suggest in their attitudes a way of thinking about and being in the world—and the actors in the film do that.

The film’s most damning review was elsewhere: In the Hollywood Reporter, Michael Rechtshaffen—in a review available online October 10, 2005—wrote, “The soapy, cliché-ridden script aside, the picture is a technical mess of awkward framing and choppy editing that puts a dispiriting damper on all that uplifting music.” After delineating the plot and commending the cast, Rechtshaffen wrote that, the film “is plagued by awkward direction—nevermind the fake singing; on more than one occasion, the characters’ eyelines are hopelessly out of sync—that doesn’t do the performances any favors.” I must admit, I had a faint shadow of a concern about the framing and positioning of actors, and I did spend a couple of minutes trying to figure out if certain performers were singing live or lip-synching—but, while watching the film, I decided some of its techniques were idiosyncratic—a la experimental film—and that many musicals have used prerecorded sound. I appreciate Rechtshaffen’s regard for technical quality, but his response, which he has a right to, seems a merciless exaggeration to me. There is a great deal of verisimilitude in the film—the congregations and locations seem authentic and the rough aspects of the film can add to that sense of the real, giving the film an aspect of a documentary. I think a lot of work went into the film, involving a large cast, and maintaining a balance of story and music, and the film is commendable just for that reason, especially coming from a director with few films to his credit.

The Gospel is a film I found valuable to see, and I could see it again—willing to be both open and critical. I now think the film The Gospel can be seen in a way similar to how James Baldwin’s novel Go Tell It On the Mountain, with its scriptural references and church setting, and Toni Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon, with its folk beliefs, are read and received: as the stories of individuals in community, with reference to texts or belief systems that give the characters a creation myth, a pantheon of saints or heroes, principles, purpose, rites, and more. Those texts and beliefs challenge human behavior and are in turn challenged by human behavior. The struggles in The Gospel are not as demanding or hurtful as those in Woman, Thou Art Loosed, which dealt with child abuse, sexual exploitation, and murder, and attempted to offer the consolation of religion, but in The Gospel’s presentation of the centrality of religion in many African-American lives, there is a similarity. I recall that Sam Cooke left the church for a popular music career, and that Al Green left a popular music career, for a long time, for the church; and these are just two stories in which the pull of the sacred and the secular have had a place. There are also analogies to be made to one’s intended adherence to any faith, even faith in art or philosophy, and to one’s commitment to any serious personal relationship. Without at all subscribing to religious faith, I found the film engaging and moving. In the film, people search their consciences—their minds, their feelings, and their moral senses—for how to act: and that is an affirmation anyone can find useful.