Kevin Koehler, the brother of Robert Koehler (a.k.a. The Marmot), has a fantastic review of the movie "Jesus Camp" up on his site, Pretentious Musings. Check it out.
My own review is here. Kevin and I hit many of the same points.
i wonder whether the filmmakers even know how political they are being in jesus camp. haggard, bothered by his presentation in the film, wrote a not nice open letter, to which they responded:
"When we heard that that Pastor Haggard has described us as having an 'agenda' we were alarmed. Of course, there are plenty of filmmakers that do make films with a political or personal agenda, but our conscience is clear that we aren’t among them."
while haggard is, of course, an a-hole, it's bizarre for the filmmakers to say that they do not have a political agenda given the structuring of jesus camp around the alito confirmation, the framing of certain camera angles to include photographs of president bush on peoples' refrigerators, et cetera. they could be lying, i imagine, though it's probably more likely that documentary filmmaking, as a form, has been so thoroughly appropriated for partisan purposes (see: michael moore) that the directors of jesus camp have come to see their picture as quite moderate.
just thought i'd get that out there and thanks again.
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thank you very much for the link, mr. mominid.
ReplyDeleteregarding the obvious slant of the film:
i wonder whether the filmmakers even know how political they are being in jesus camp. haggard, bothered by his presentation in the film, wrote a not nice open letter, to which they responded:
http://www.jesuscampthemovie.com/haggard_response.html
"When we heard that that Pastor Haggard has described us as having an 'agenda' we were alarmed. Of course, there are plenty of filmmakers that do make films with a political or personal agenda, but our conscience is clear that we aren’t among them."
while haggard is, of course, an a-hole, it's bizarre for the filmmakers to say that they do not have a political agenda given the structuring of jesus camp around the alito confirmation, the framing of certain camera angles to include photographs of president bush on peoples' refrigerators, et cetera. they could be lying, i imagine, though it's probably more likely that documentary filmmaking, as a form, has been so thoroughly appropriated for partisan purposes (see: michael moore) that the directors of jesus camp have come to see their picture as quite moderate.
just thought i'd get that out there and thanks again.