Huie's Sermon is one of the films from Werner Herzog which is ostensibly a documentary but not in a traditional sense, like the earlier How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck (1976) the idea of this film is simply to watch events with no editorial opinion offered. I guess the idea being that what is filmed speaks for itself. In this instance, the subject is the Reverend Huie L. Rogers, or more specifically one of his sermons. It begins quite unremarkably but slowly builds a momentum and rhythm that it becomes a performance piece. The presentation was so rhythmical and emotional that I soon was caught up so much in its sound and feel that I stopped paying any attention to its content. It incorporated music accompaniment and really had the feel of intense soul music quite often. It was quite a show but it was tiring to watch, never mind what it must have been to deliver. The film-making here is resolutely lo-fi with a single camera simply pointing at the reverend in an unbroken single shot for the most part. The main alternatives to this were some tracking shots of the run-down Brooklyn neighbourhood in which the church's congregation came from. These badly deprived streets were an interesting counterpoint to the wild passion of the church; it showed that it's often people with the least advantages who create the most joy. Overall, a fascinating, if limited film.
