A Religion of Chaos: On King Vidor’s Hallelujah
This paper was originally written for the “Film Analysis” course within the Film and Media Studies graduate program at Arizona State University, completed March 3, 2020.
King Vidor’s 1929 film Hallelujah, his first talkie and the first major studio picture to feature an all-black cast, ends with a very sudden rehabilitation of its vacillating main character Zeke (Daniel L. Haynes). In the movie’s climactic sequence, Zeke chases down city slicker Hot Shot (William Fountaine) and chokes him to death after the man restarted an affair with Zeke’s “girl” Chick (Nina Mae McKinney), herself a morally vacillating character. In fact, the murder comes on the heels of Chick’s own death, essentially precipitated by Zeke himself when he caused the crash of the fleeing couple’s carriage. This entire dark sequence transitions into a very brief moment of Zeke working on a chain gang, which cuts to the former cotton field worker, preacher, and logger returning home with a smile on his lips and a loving welcome from his family and former fiancée, transformed by his tragedies and a newfound appreciation for religion for the better.
Vidor was a constant commentator on the “Myth of America,” as Margaret and William E. Hrezo put it (68). With Hallelujah, he aimed his sights at religion; specifically, he focused on the African American experience of Christianity. Of course, that African American experience was filtered by his viewpoint as a white man, in addition to the perspectives of his three white writing collaborators. Regardless of accuracy, Vidor paints the African American religious experience as inherently chaotic, a struggle between secular and sacred, sexuality and chasteness, city and rural life, and sentiment and reason. He does so by contrasting Zeke’s secular and sacred moments with darkness and light, employing stark lighting changes to illustrate his deviance from and return to a stable life. The emerging sound technology refined for Hallelujah, praised for its time for its effective use of diegetic sound (in the “world” of the film, not soundtrack or score, which were not yet possible), also lends itself to Vidor’s portrayal, pairing dialogue and silence with the darkness and choruses of black voices for the light.
A more thorough synopsis of Hallelujah is necessary to understand it. The aforementioned protagonist, Zeke, is a cotton sharecropper. He works a family “business” (which is never connected to the continuation of plantation structures in the Reconstruction South), bolstered also by the presence of Missy Rose (Victoria Spivey), a non-relation to Zeke nevertheless taken in by the family some years ago. Zeke is infatuated with Rose, but his infatuation falls on a much less innocent character when he and his younger brother Spunk head into town to sell the season’s yield. With a pocket full of bills, Zeke “seduces” Chick, who in turn swindles him by connecting him with dice player Hot Shot. Hot Shot has loaded dice and Zeke is ruined, as is his family. Zeke and Hot Shot wrestle for a gun in the aftermath, which goes off and kills Spunk. Zeke reforms and becomes a traveling preacher, going around the country with his parents and Rose; Zeke and Rose become engaged, but Chick and Hot Shot reenter the picture. Chick appears saved by Zeke’s proselytizing, but she ultimately seduces him away from Rose once again. In the third of Zeke’s four “lives” in Hallelujah, he becomes a logger, with Chick fooling around with Hot Shot at home. And those series of events lead to the deaths of the “sinful” pair and Zeke’s salvation, as mentioned above.
In Hallelujah, African American secularity is represented, first, by sexuality. In fact, Vidor was quoted in the years following the film’s release as saying Hallelujah was “a contrast between sex and religion, and a ‘struggle’ between good and evil” (Durgnat 19). Raymond Durgnat questions this black-and-white assertion by quoting Vidor’s own words about the Southern black people he had known growing up: “‘the sincerity and fervor of their religious expression,’ but also ‘the honest simplicity of their sexual drives’” intermingled and “‘seemed to offer strikingly dramatic content’” (19).
Whether Vidor’s opposites combine to offer a “gray” worldview or not, the dramatic divide is elicited by the moment of Chick’s seduction of Zeke away from a religious vocation. In this scene, Zeke is led out of a revival meeting following his own engagement to Rose. Inside the barn, shadows of bodies writhe upon the walls, cast high with stark, bright light. But where Chick leads him, the dark forest, the collective and wholesome sense of joy is lost. Vidor lights this scene like a surreal nightmare, and when Rose goes out to find Zeke, her innocence, and physical presence, are swallowed up by the dark. Zeke’s “reckless acquiescence exposes his sense of his moral unworthiness” (Durgnat 20), given weight by a sudden shift in lighting.
Vidor’s novel use of sound, which thematically grounded Hallelujah unlike most other sound films of the time, also complements the visual storytelling in this scene. Jessica H. Howard writes “the audio in Hallelujah is, in a word, natural, flowing from the supposed everyday folk activities of its black characters (as understood by Vidor)” (442). Just as Vidor and cinematographer Gordon Avil use light to portray two extremes, so too is sound used excessively to “act magically, entrancing and seducing Zeke and others in unpredictable ways that render the music’s substance fundamentally indecipherable and exotic, and within the realm of the sublime” (Howard 444). While Howard is using this description to imply the use of music as crucial to both the film’s secular and sacred moments, song is most commonly employed to illustrate the collective. So, the “indecipherable and exotic” celebrations of Zeke and Rose’s family and friends elevate the moment to religious and sacred heights, while away from the sound, Zeke and Chick’s whispers and Rose’s plaintive cries represent the absence of God.
Zeke’s sacred “seduction” of Chick, before she leads him away from Miss Rose and into the darkness of the forest, paints the situation in reverse. Chick, after following Zeke and making fun of his new profession as a preacher, falls in with his baptism ceremony. Her orgiastic screams, removed from any kind of sexual experience, are brought out in the light of day, in a beautiful pond nestled in a bright meadow. “These purificatory immersions — erotic or comic — amidst meadowland, contrast with Zeke’s murder of Hot Shot in marshy forest,” Durgnat writes (20). Aurally, the constant yells of the born-again women complement the daytime. “The practice of repetition helps to define how sympathy works in this film,” Howard writes. “This film demonstrates that by ‘joining in’ one can experience for oneself the pain or the joy indicated by, and enacted through, the original chant” (446).
Vidor’s address of religion in Hallelujah is not entirely made by way of the most obvious of mores, sexuality. He also compares city and rural life as extensions of religious experience in America. “He [Vidor] has been called both right-wing and left-wing, but actually his work does not embody any ideology” (Hrezo 70). However, his clear “concern for lower middle class people in a variety of circumstances and environments” (Hrezo 70) leads to Vidor’s favoring of the simplicity of country living, conflating it with the wholesomeness brought together by a collective religion. Although one could never describe Zeke or his family as middle class, at any level, their “cotton-picking” existence is demonstrated as undisturbed by the dangers of city slicking.
When Zeke enters the town bar where he would be swindled by Hot Shot and Chick and where his brother Spunk would be killed, the interior’s darkness immediately feels different from the interior of Zeke’s family home from earlier in the film. This isn’t to say that all of Hallelujah’s tragic moments happen in the dark, and all the good ones in the light. However, the walls of the den of illicit behavior appear almost matte, the light within the place not reaching very far. By contrast, the scenes at the family’s house contain a flickering, continuously surging and retreating light, illustrated in the aforementioned scene of the indoor revival meeting. The shadows are made by the communal body, whereas in the saloon, the “crowd, at first jolly enough…scatters as soon as a shooting looks like trouble” (Durgnat 22). Contrary to a dour mood that such darkness might imply, the scene is preempted by a jazz-blues musical number performed by McKinney as Chick. However, the modern, fast, and exotic ideas that the genre represents can be seen as urban temptations away from the deeper, ephemeral, and “sublime” sounds of the a cappella spirituals sung by Zeke and his family.
A cappella vocals supported by diegetic sound effects are somewhat of the hallmark of Hallelujah. Earlier in the film, they’re demonstrated by the tap-dancing abilities of the young boys in Zeke’s family. Most significantly, they’re depicted in Zeke’s outdoor revival meeting in the meadow, prior to the aforementioned baptisms. During this scene, he links his sermon to a locomotive metaphor. As he shuffles his feet on the makeshift stage, churning up a sound approximating rails and wheels, Zeke calls for his flock to get on board and follow the Lord. “In the film’s major transformation scenes [this being one of them], increasing numbers of voices join Zeke in his chanting and song-chanting (often in a call-and-response pattern) as he approaches the “other” world of music (after which everyone sings in coordinated fashion)” (Howard 446). This extended quote illustrates Vidor’s perceived appreciation for rural, religious African American life. Its apparent ability to make whole the disparate urban masses of The Crowd (1928), for example, is the absolute antithesis of “the isolation of city life” Vidor’s previous film presents (Hrezo 72). Visually, this locomotive-based performance foreshadows Zeke’s return home, reformed for good, aboard a train on a similarly sunny day, “the locomotive signaling the potential for positive social change” (Wingard 125).
At the broadest level, Vidor’s synonyms for either side of a religious experience are sentiment and reason. One might think “sentiment” belongs to a faith-based existence, but to Vidor, sentiment gives way to recklessness and reason fosters communal experiences. The reason of machines and labor, represented by the train and cotton fields, don’t isolate Zeke. “Trains during the 1930s provided a platform for positive sociopolitical change,” Leslie Wingard writes (125). The sentiment of overcoming society or one’s own will can lead one astray. “In King Vidor’s films, characters restlessly search for some balance between individuality and community…He celebrates positive aspects of the American mind, including its openness,” Margaret and William E. Hrezo write. “However, he also warns us of both its dangers for society and the individual who does not fit…those who ignore this advice do so at their peril (Hallelujah, Ruby Gentry, Duel in the Sun, for example)” (75).
Sentiment is represented by Zeke’s dueling relationships with the two women of the film, Rose and Chick. In terms of lighting, the assignment of sentiment to the secular still matches up. Zeke and Chick’s increasing sexual tension reaches a violent peak in the dark saloon. And the first encounter between Zeke and Rose in the film showcases a shot in the family home not seen again, with the latter playing an organ up against a window, the lights streaming in from outside not doing much to remove the dark pleasure on Zeke’s face as he watches. Rose’s playing of “The Wedding March” makes him “possessed by sexual desire for her” (Howard 446). “Claiming that the devil is in him, Zeke shows in this scene the power of music (not necessarily vocal music) to activate human passion, a passion that may be realized in the form of religious fervor or sexuality (or both),” as Howard argues (446).
Vidor nevertheless presents religious fervor as the safer side, a place of reason as opposed to individualized sentiment. Even during the darkest tragedies, light and sound bring solace to grieving parties. That is the case in Hallelujah during the funeral of Spunk, where Mammy (Fanny Belle DeKnight) is centrally framed amid the collective, mourning bodies and the film’s quintessential, dramatic, long, and dark shadows cast by strong, flickering light. “The feelings of true community, at the funeral, are as orgiastic as any others” (Durgnat 22). To Howard, “Mammy’s fluctuating chant-like vocalizations” as “rising desperateness, resignation, primal love for her son, her anticipated loss, her position as caretaker in the family, and so on…sets up a system of meaning” (446). This extent of religious zeal brings believers to a true sense of community, a more reasonable community that protects, supports, and loves its own.
These ideas are apparently believed by Vidor, as mentioned, as it pertains to the African American religious experience. By looking back at Hallelujah’s climactic sequence, the cohesion of his viewpoint is best expressed. The light of Zeke and Chick’s home gives way to a dark chase through a murky swamp. Somehow, the noise of the pursuit, the crashing and gunshots and even Chick’s dying screams, maintain a higher reason than the morbid, eerily quiet hunt of Hot Shot by Zeke. But slick city ideals and shortcuts are crushed by the fury of a rural simplicity. And the promise of religious salvation and community ends up saving a life (Zeke’s) after three big deaths. A viewing of Hallelujah, fittingly enough, can yield a chaotic response to the chaos contained within it because of its apparently mixed messages and now socially “problematic” content. Ultimately, the film tells a religious African American saga in just over an hour and a half, filtered through a savvy white Hollywood filmmaker whose lasting impressions of the black men, women, and children he knew was their chaotic devotion to each other and God.
Bibliography
Durgnat, Raymond. “Hallelujah! (1929).” Film Comment, vol. 9, no. 4, Aug. 1973.
Howard, Jessica H. “Hallelujah!: Transformation in Film.” African American Review, vol. 30, no. 3, 1996.
Hrezo, Margaret and William E. “The Politics of the ‘Open’ Self: America in the Cinema of King Vidor and Robert Altman.” Studies in Popular Culture, vol. 32, no. 2, 2010.
Wingard, Leslie. “Laying Down the Rails: Sacred and Secular Groundwork in Zora Neale Hurston’s Jonah’s Gourd Vine and King Vidor’s Hallelujah.” South: A Scholarly Journal, vol. 49, no. 1, 2016.
