Verdict: Not Guilty

A woman who has died in childbirth, unmarried, is tried in heaven; the jailer wears a death's-head mask, God sits on an altar between angels, and the devil prosecutes. Eloyce and James Gist were evangelists who made films to show in Black churches, on 16mm with a hand-held camera and a congregation for a cast, and the camera shakes and the exposures wander, so the film is a church pageant caught on stock rather than staged for it. Nine minutes survive. With their Hell-Bound Train, the only known work of the Gists, restored from fragments by the Library of Congress. Washington, D.C., about 1933.