Another short documentary by Werner Herzog with minimal directorial input. It's similar in scope to both GOD'S ANGRY MAN, another impassioned religious rant, and the one where Herzog filmed auctioneers at a sale. There's something hypnotic about watching Huie at work and this plays out as testament to his skills as orator, his sermon almost turning into song at one point. My main complaint is that the dialogue is quite difficult to understand even if you turn the volume up.

Pretty much the title tells it all, its a sermon by a pastor in a church in a run down part of Brooklyn. The Camera pretty much focuses squarely on the man as he says his piece. It begins slowly and then slowly builds. Statically filmed, the camera simply watches the Reverend and never moves, this is the film equivalent of being in the church. It's a bit awkward at first since not a great deal happens but as time goes on and the emotion begins to build it becomes something to see. One is drawn into the film quite easily. No tricks, no games, no real cutaways, just the man doing what he does. More footnote then a meal this is am intriguing look at something many people don't experience. Definitely worth a look, though I would either watch this on its own or at the start of a program of Herzog's short films because odds are anything seen before this will make it tough to get through due to the static nature of the camera work and the slow building of the emotion.

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.