| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929–1949. By Judith Weisenfeld. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. xiv, 341 pp. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-520-22774-3.)
In African American filmmaker Spencer Williams's Blood of Jesus (1941), Martha, the movie's central character, is accidentally shot by her religiously wayward husband. Hovering near death, Martha embarks on a dream-like spiritual journey, struggling against Satan to return to her now prayerful husband. "The righteous have been treated with contempt and almost driven from the face of the earth," an angel tells Martha. "But they have not died in vain. Each succeeding generation has built monuments to their memory" (pp. 101–2).	1
This interlude in Williams's film could stand as a tribute to the African American filmmakers in Judith Weisenfeld's study of the representation of African American religion in American film from 1929 through 1949. Weisenfeld's thoughtful work is vividly insightful and explores both white moviedom's presentation of black religion and the responses by independent African American filmmakers to white Hollywood's degrading stereotypes. She successfully demonstrates that nearly all black images constructed by white filmmakers rested on a distortion of black religion. Within the white imagination, blacks on film became simple and childlike devotees of a faith they could not comprehend. Additionally, white moviemakers often portrayed black worshippers as so completely overtaken with passion that they were driven to sexual abandon.	. . .

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