Juke: Passages from the Films of Spencer Williams is a 2015 documentary film [1] [2] by film essayist Thom Andersen featuring selected excerpts from the films of African American director Spencer Williams Jr. [3]
The film is a plotless thirty-minute montage reconsidering Spencer's religious melodramas [4] such as The Blood of Jesus (1941) that cuts scenes and aspects of his films [5] while assembling major and minor moments into a portrait reflecting 1940s Black America. [6]
Commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art as part of their program “A Road Three Hundred Years Long: Cinema and the Great Migration”, [7] [8] [9] Thom regraded his movie as [10]
"a kin to Walker Evans' photographs of sharecroppers' homes in the 1930s and George Orwell's essays on English working class interiors".
Juke: Passages from the Films of Spencer Williams is a 2015 documentary film [1] [2] by film essayist Thom Andersen featuring selected excerpts from the films of African American director Spencer Williams Jr. [3]
The film is a plotless thirty-minute montage reconsidering Spencer's religious melodramas [4] such as The Blood of Jesus (1941) that cuts scenes and aspects of his films [5] while assembling major and minor moments into a portrait reflecting 1940s Black America. [6]
Commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art as part of their program “A Road Three Hundred Years Long: Cinema and the Great Migration”, [7] [8] [9] Thom regraded his movie as [10]
"a kin to Walker Evans' photographs of sharecroppers' homes in the 1930s and George Orwell's essays on English working class interiors".