Hell-Bound Train

James and Eloyce Gist, circa 1930: a homemade evangelical feature, the train to hell packed with dancers, drinkers, and women who have had abortions, each car a sin, the engineer the Devil. Shot on 16mm for the Black church circuit. It is not a studio film. It is a sermon that learned to splice, and the splicing is furious. Jazz as damnation, a locomotive as theology. Among the most important surviving amateur features in American religious cinema, and one of the few that treats Black audiences as a congregation, not a market.