The old songs that you taught me

While living in New York City in the early seventies, fine art student turned filmmaker James Szalapski had a roommate called 'Skinny' Dennis Sanchez, a bass player. When Sanchez went to Nashville to visit Guy Clark, a Texan songwriter and luthier who had returned to the South after being disillusioned by Los Angeles, he was enthralled by the circle of musicians who gathered regularly at Clark's house. Sanchez' stories intrigued Szalapski, who was then looking for his next project.

With thirty-five thousand dollars from a single sponsor, Szalapski assembled a small crew and followed Clark and the singer-songwriters he met through him from Nashville to Austin, Texas during 1975 and early 1976. The resulting film - expanded from a planned hour-long television documentary - made the rounds at festivals, but due to bad luck and limited commercial appeal it was not released theatrically until 1981. By that time the original title, New Country, had been discarded in favour of the more poetic Heartworn Highways.

Using loose association rather than a single narrative thread, the film presents a number of singer-songwriters and others across Tennessee and Texas. We're shown the painstaking precision work of recording Larry Jon Wilson's 'Ohoopee River Bottomland'. Townes Van Zandt shows the camera crew around his dilapidated trailer in Austin. David Allan Coe drives to a concert at the Tennessee State Prison. Guy Clark repairs guitars, and at his house a group including Steve Young, Rodney Crowell and Steve Earle (the latter two only in their twenties) hang out, drink and share songs.

Heartworn Highways exists for the music, and Szalapski gives the performances plenty of room to breathe. Guy Clark opens the film with a stunning rendition of 'L.A. Freeway' (Clark is more self-critical: 'A little loose,' he complains), and David Allan Coe provides its emotional heart with 'I Still Sing the Old Songs', an elegy that caused me to properly admire Coe's songwriting for the first time ('I still sing the old song that you taught me/And I still pray to Jesus now and then/And just like you I wish that he would save me/To see the day the South will rise again'). Then there's Steve Young's heartbreaking 'Alabama Highway', which accompanies Coe's drive through the Southern rain.

Those songs centre the film on Szalapski's fascination with a group of Southern songwriters who had travelled north or to California but found themselves drifting back home, drawn by something they couldn't leave behind. Not necessarily something positive, mind you: these songs are full of misery, poverty and longing for escape, more haunting evocations of Southern life than the celebration found in mainstream country. Szalapski's camera lingers on the ephemera of Tennessee roads: car transporters, overturned meat transports, and cars stuck in traffic. These men are rooted yet itinerant, rambling between states and - in Townes Van Zandt's case - occasionally actually homeless, searching for a Dixieland that keeps slipping through their fingers.

The lengthy sequence at Townes Van Zandt's place in Austin both reinforces and undermines that narrative. According to Steve Earle, the Nashville singer-songwriters deliberately sent Szalapski to Austin in the expectation that Van Zandt would clown around instead of providing footage of the world's greatest songwriter at work. And in a sense that's just what Townes does, introducing his girlfriend and his dog and leading the crew on a pointless but highly entertaining tour around the run-down property. (Because the film doesn't use narration, there's no-one to point out Townes was the son of an oil baron, not the hillbilly he pretends to be here.)

But instead of being a waste of time, the Austin scenes introduce us to Townes's neighbour, seventy-nine-year-old 'Uncle' Seymour Washington, a former blacksmith who explains his approach to horses (being gentle and friendly) and whiskey (God meant for us to enjoy it, but drink in moderation). In a film intended for a privileged white audience, it's virtually impossible for people of colour to be portrayed as just human beings rather than Magical Negroes dispensing homespun wisdom. Such qualms sour these scenes a bit, but they can't overwhelm the easy chemistry between Washington and Van Zandt. Their banter leads into the best performance in the film, Townes Van Zandt's sublime rendition of 'Waitin' Around to Die'.

Like 'Waitin' Around to Die', the prevailing mood in Heartworn Highways is elegiac. The boot-stomping rebellion associated with a term like 'outlaw country' isn't entirely absent: witness Coe's foul-mouthed tirades in front of prison inmates while wearing an awful rhinestone suit that screams 1975! like little else on display here. But all in all it's a subdued, unassuming documentary, quiet to the point of being boring at times. It requires patience and more than a little passion for this style of music. (I have the latter, at least.)

As the junior generation to the more established outlaw stars of the day (Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard, etc.), most of these musicians never made it out of the country music underground. The exceptions - Townes Van Zandt, whose 'highly authentic ghost' now belongs to everyone, and Steve Earle, popular with a far larger roots rock crowd - transcended rather than abandoned their origin. In hindsight, Heartworn Highways presents not the outlaw movement per se, much less the birth of Americana, but the gnarled roots of today's Texas country scene. It is, in any case, a surprisingly meditative look at a musical subculture whose critique of Nashville is as valid now as it was forty years ago.

And these signs shall follow them that believe

In 1966-67, then-twentysomething filmmaker Peter Adair and his crew spent a year with a Pentecostal Holiness congregation in rural Scrabble Creek, West Virginia. Shot on a shoestring budget, the resulting 53-minute documentary Holy Ghost People (1967) was not released to cinemas* but made some critical waves and survived on the rental market. (Today it's in the public domain, so you are without excuse.)

Adair went on to carve out a career far from the mainstream with Word Is Out (1977), the first significant documentary to present LGBTQ people on their own terms. His later films, The AIDS Show: Artists Involved in Death and Survival (1986) and Absolutely Positive (1991), chronicled the impact of the disease on the gay community, as well as Adair's own life under the shadow of being HIV-positive. He died in 1996, aged fifty-two.

Holy Ghost People opens with decontextualised snapshots of a Pentecostal service: music is played, a girl dances frantically, someone holds a serpent, an old woman looks at the camera, a Bible reading is cut off mid-sentence by the editing. It's not too bold, I think, to call it a critique of the sort of sensationalist reporting on extreme religious phenomena that leaves us understanding less, not more. The rest of the film is a careful examination of the forces shaping the church's practices, an aetiology of Pentecostal worship in Appalachia as much as it is a record.

The film steps back, and Adair's narration sets the scene over footage of the area around Scrabble Creek shot from a moving car. The poverty of rural West Virginia in the sixties is frankly shocking: in the heart of the world's richest nation, these communities look more like the villages I've seen in the backwoods of Bolivia and Paraguay. Adair explains that while the church's raucous, unstructured worship practices are legal in West Virginia (but not in neighbouring states), adherents are often ostracised by their own communities. He stresses that snakebite, though common, is not usually fatal.

Most of the film is taken up by a lengthy service that unites the Scrabble Creek congregation with fellow believers who have travelled over sixty miles from Virginia. Adair starts us off slowly, showing most of the worship leader's somewhat rambling notices - tributes to those in attendance, prayer requests, and remarks on the film crew in attendance. (In classic cinéma vérité style, Adair draws attention to the presence of the camera.) From there, the service gradually escalates from singing and testimonies to wild dancing, speaking in tongues, convulsions, falling over ('being slain in the Spirit') and eventually snake-handling.

A key part of the film comes just before that, though, in the form of individual interviews with four congregants. One man first spoke in tongues at the age of thirteen, but grew up to be 'a very mean fellow' and spent a year praying in vain for the return of the gift after his release from prison, before finally receiving tongues again during a service. Another was dissatisfied with the evangelical churches he attended, and eventually found 'the Holiness way' through his father-in-law's influence and the powerful experience of a supernatural wind sweeping through his body at night. A woman talks about the happiness brought by the Holy Spirit, and her first experience drinking strychnine during a worship meeting. The last interviewee is a middle-aged woman who is wracked by convulsions and breaks into glossolalia in the middle of sentences she shouts with a preacher's cadence and inflection, rendering her all but incoherent.

Letting these people explain themselves in their own words, without interruption or cuts, is indispensable in setting out the background against which their worship takes place. It turns them from an incomprehensible - and, given their practices, possibly terrifying - Other into ordinary, sympathetic protagonists. As anthropologist Margaret Mead, who invited Adair to introduce the film to her students at Columbia, writes: 'The people in the film are work-worn and show the marks of malnutrition, poverty, and poor medical care, and yet, on a recent showing to a very sophisticated audience, someone on my right exclaimed: "What beautiful people!"' That's a privileged perspective, of course. But it reflects Adair's success in breaking through the liberal sneer at rural people preferred by the light entertainment that passes for public discourse.

In the face of their small number, legal trouble and hostility from neighbours, adherents resist by appealing to authenticity: the free, unfettered flow of God's spirit. In worship at least, the myriad hierarchies and restrictions on their lives disappear. In his testimony, one congregant lambastes people who 'think it's a disgrace to touch a serpent'. He is unashamed because 'I don't want to be highly esteemed among men. I gotta be just what I am, glory be to God.'

While Adair emphasises that serpent-handling only occurs when adherents feel led by the Spirit and far more time is dedicated to prayer and other charismatic manifestations, the congregation eventually do pick up venomous snakes, lifting them in the air, throwing them across the room and dancing with them. It's unsurprising that this requires hype, but it's still an astonishing display of faith (at least quantitatively). Near the end of the meeting the worship leader is bitten by a copperhead on camera. While he cleans the blood from his hand with a borrowed handkerchief he calmly declares: 'If I die with this snakebite, it's still God's word, just the same. God's word is just the same... Whether we die by it or live by it, it's still God's word.' Is that an impressive reliance on God's grace - whatever the folly of deliberately provoking venomous snakes - or a deeply problematic flirting with death?

Shot on the cheapest 16mm film stock known to man, Holy Ghost People's rough and ready look reinforces its down-to-earth setting. (The poor lighting and sound recording is inevitable in a low-budget documentary, but the awful digitisation isn't - what is this 'file size' you speak of?) Structured carefully and without sensationalism, Holy Ghost People nonetheless transports the wild atmosphere and sense of real danger to the screen (I challenge you not to squirm during the snake-handling scenes.)

The first charismatic service I went to ended with an altar call to come forward and receive the Holy Spirit. I stayed in my seat, not just because I was a firmer cessationist then than I am now but because I was frankly intimidated by the manifestations I'd just witnessed. Yes, they could easily be explained by appeal to religious euphoria, but it wasn't just implausibility. Charismatic worship requires an abandonment of self-control that is pretty alien to the bourgeois ideal of the individual (which is why it appeals to so many people). Holy Ghost People lays bare both why I find the charismatic movement fascinating and why it isn't for me.

*So far as I know, at least; I've been able to find woefully little information on the film online. Anyone who knows more, don't hesitate to pitch in.

I've got that old time religion in my hoard

Marjoe (1972) may have won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, but Cinema 5 did their damnedest to release the film as stealthily as possible, and all but buried it afterwards. There was a 1983 VHS release, but the film itself was thought lost until the negative was rediscovered in a vault, restored, screened and released on DVD in the 2000s. Which is obviously to the good: you won't watch a documentary like Marjoe this side of glory, so it'd be a shame if it was lost forever.

It's hardly surprising, though, that the distributor feared a backlash and virtually declined to release the film in the Bible Belt. Featuring an entirely faithless evangelist raking in the cash from Pentecostal congregations and casually sharing the tricks of the trade, Marjoe was sure to infuriate both the duped and the protagonist's, er, colleagues. But Marjoe wouldn't be very interesting if it was only an exposé. Its power comes from the real questions it asks about faith, showmanship, suffering and ethics.

Marjoe Gortner began preaching in tent revival meetings at the age of four, after his ambitious evangelist parents discovered his flair for the dramatic and confidence in front of crowds. Billed as 'the youngest ordained minister in history' and ruthlessly drilled in money-making tricks by his parents, Marjoe travelled the revival circuit and appeared on television until his mid-teens. When his father absconded with the family's money, a disillusioned Gortner drifted to the West Coast and immersed himself in hippie culture for several years. Lacking the education or formal training for a 'normal' job, in the mid-sixties Gortner went back to what he did best: he began working as a preacher again.

This time, though, he kept the money himself, and was able to work just six months a year thanks to donations and the sale of prayer cloths and other paraphernalia. It was a living, but Gortner was tired of it, and hoped to change careers to acting. So when he travelled the American South preaching, prophesying, and healing the sick one last time in 1971 he allowed a team of documentary filmmakers to follow him around, constantly sharing the tricks of the trade behind the scenes - unbeknownst to congregations, other preachers and even Gortner's own father, all of whom were given the impression of a straight documentary.

Certainly, Marjoe's greatest asset is its morally ambiguous protagonist. Gortner's transformation from his 'real self' to screaming revival preacher - complete with a totally different cadence and inflection - is astonishing. By showing off his acting chops and everyday persona, Marjoe doubles as an audition tape for Gortner's anticipated career in showbiz (his record, for which he exploited his renewed post-Marjoe fame, flopped but he was able to carve out a moderately successful career in genre films and television). So there's real doubt, I think, as to whether such an expert self-publicist ever lets us see the 'real' Gortner. But he's so darn likeable it hardly matters.

Gortner cheerfully admits that even as a child he never believed in God, but enjoyed the attention and did as he was told. (He still uses the story of his prophetic calling made up by his parents in later meetings.) Like many people who aren't required to subscribe to doctrinal statements, Gortner holds pretty vague beliefs in reality: he'd like people to love and forgive each other. He'd even be content to preach Jesus, he says, if he didn't have to go on about hell. He doesn't think he's a particularly moral person, but not actively malevolent either: 'I'm bad, but not evil'.

There's no denying, though, that Gortner is essentially a fraud, using mass psychology and carefully engineered religious ecstasy to persuade people to open their wallets. Asked point-blank if he is a conman late in the film, Gortner's girlfriend gets a little embarrassed. It's not just Marjoe who is living a double life, though. His preacher colleagues may genuinely believe in Jesus and the Holy Spirit, but they also know the importance of a well-executed meeting to their bottom line. I prefer Gortner's open lack of faith, in fact: after all, it's not the cold that Jesus warns, it's the lukewarm.

Fred Clark distinguishes between two types of Christian conservatives: true believers, who sincerely believe in the amalgamation of Christianity and conservatism peddled by the Religious Right, and hucksters, who are in it for the money and the power. Marjoe suggests a third type: the semi-true believer, who has faith in the work of the Holy Spirit but also in the power of emotional manipulation to fill the pews and his coffers. This type, surely, is found everywhere in modern evangelicalism and is the raison d'être of the church growth movement.

In Marjoe, itinerant preachers emerge as a community resembling magicians, sharing tricks of the trade. There's a lot of fascinating stuff. For example, Gortner mentions creating the illusion of a glowing cross on his forehead by smearing his skin with transparent dye that would react with his perspiration during the sermon. Then there are the movements he's adapted from Mick Jagger and his strategic use of repetition, shouting and surprise to induce religious trance and falling over ('being slain in the Spirit') when he lays hands on people coming up during the altar call. Similar tricks are in use today.

I've only been to a couple of charismatic worship services and they freaked me out, so, being unadventurous, I returned to what I liked best: silently judging people in a traditional church setting. There's no denying, though, that Gortner's servies fulfil real needs: joy, peace and healing, even if it is only for a few hours, for people who are otherwise downtrodden and sick. (Another preacher gives a nauseous sermon in which he thanks God for his brand-new Cadillac - go prosperity gospel!)

In that sense, perhaps Gortner can't be considered a fraud at all: don't attendees get the exact same experience with him as they would with a more sincere preacher? (And, theologically speaking, is not God's spirit quite independent of human machinations, and hardly frustrated in his work by a fraud?) Preying on people in the vulnerable state induced by religious ecstasy - however legitimate, even beneficial that experience may be in itself - is not improved morally by the sincerity of practitioners. Give me an honest fraud like Marjoe Gortner over a semi-true believer any day.

'Do you know what Strontium-90 is, and what it does?'

The story behind Peter Watkins's 1965 docu-drama The War Game is gnarled and contentious. Funded by £10,000 from a reluctant BBC at a time of power struggle inside the Corporation, the final 48-minute film made higher-ups profoundly uncomfortable. After privately screening The War Game for representatives of several government departments (including the Ministry of Defence, the Home Office and the Post Office), the BBC decided not to broadcast the film.*

The resulting imbroglio is detailed in Watkins's account, which makes fascinating reading for anyone interested in the raison d'état of the rump British Empire in the sixties. The BBC tried to shake off accusations of political censorship by screening the film to select elite audiences - specifically excluding film critics -, but scrupulously avoided showing it to a wider public. As Watkins stresses, the print media overwhelmingly backed the BBC's line (some choice quotes there).

The film's rehabilitation began when a limited theatrical run resulted in The War Game winning Best Documentary Feature during the 1966 Academy Awards. The BBC, which had previously claimed that it was only Watkins's artistic failings that had led them to suppress the film - as we all know, the Corporation cares deeply about our delicate artistic sensibilities, which is why Top Gear exists - finally broadcast The War Game in 1985, as part of the forty-year anniversary coverage of the bombing of Hiroshima. For his part, Watkins has continued as a stridently left-wing and anti-war documentary filmmaker, falling foul of censorship as often as he's won awards.

The War Game falls into three kinds of footage, mixed within the film. First, there are short interviews with a random sample of passers-by ('Do you know what Strontium-90 is, and what it does?') which reveal the British public as woefully underinformed on the horrors of nuclear war. Interspersed, there are monologues based on real recorded statements by authority figures in government, military and church, which tend towards the utterly insane presented with a certain cheer ('The Aztecs on their feast days would sacrifice 20,000 men to their gods in the belief that this would keep the universe on its proper course. We feel superior to them.')

The meat of the film and the source of most controversy, though, is a merciless recreation of the horrors of a Soviet nuclear strike on Kent, presented in the style of a documentary. A Chinese ground invasion of South Vietnam leads to the US authorising the use of tactical nuclear weapons - first in Indochina, then, as tensions escalate between the blocs, in Germany. This is followed by Soviet massive retaliation on targets in western Europe, including the UK. Apart from the millions killed instantaneously, much of British society collapses in the following months as radiation disease, starvation and post-traumatic stress overwhelm a totally inadequate civil defence system.

Filming around Tonsbridge, Gravesend, Chatham and Dover, Watkins uses almost entirely non-professional actors (ironically considering the director's left-wing stance, this caused him some trouble with actors' unions). He achieves a sense of extraordinary immediacy by using a lot of shaky handheld camerawork (old hat in 2012, revolutionary then), realistically imperfect dialogue, and seemingly unscripted moments. Among a talented crew, Lilian Munro's make-up work stands out for its unflinching recreation of injuries (severe burns, poisoning), skin covered in soot, and other misery.

All of which sounds a bit technical, so let me be clear, in the manner of the Prime Minister: The War Game is among the most horrifying films I've ever seen. I don't say that lightly or frivolously. In the many, many hours I've misspent watching exploitation films, only The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Cannibal Holocaust have sickened me to my very soul to the same extent as The War Game. That's not because it's particularly explicit (much of the film works by suggestion), but because what is portrayed is just so much more gut-churningly awful than what even the most depraved horror directors tend to dream up: newly blind children covering their faces after the brightness of a thousand suns has burnt their retinas, people dying from carbon monoxide poisoning, others beaten to death by starving mobs.

In all that, Watkins is keen to stress that what he's portraying is not speculative but merely a dramatisation of existing scientific predictions. 'It's been estimated that...', begins sentence after sentence of horrifying statistics that imbue the film with a sense of inexorability. Reviewers were of course right to call The War Game totally one-sided: but who could imagine a 'balanced' film on this subject? A documentary that detailed the horrors of atomic fallout before enumerating the many wonderful upsides of nuclear weapons would surely be more repulsive than The War Game, not less.

There is, then, a disgusting hypocrisy in the official response to The War Game. According to the defence and media establishment, planning the murder of millions upon millions of civilians is quite all right just so long as one uses the correct euphemisms; the moral transgression apparently lies in spelling out the reality. As Orwell said, the genocidal reality of modern power 'can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties'. Hence the need for obfuscating language and misinformation - which, as Watkins points out, is precisely likely to increase casualties in the eventuality of war.

A mere calm listing of the inevitable horrors of all-out atomic war would refute any case for nuclear weapons, but that's not all Watkins does. By focusing on the darker aspects of Allied conduct in the Second World War, he critiques the justifying ideologies of British power. Again and again, the narrator stresses that the scenario is merely an extrapolation of what happened to Hamburg, Darmstadt, Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki: and who dropped those bombs? When the firestorm created by a one-megaton bomb destroys Rochester, 'the oxygen is being consumed in every cellar and every ground floor room'. Which is how 42,000 civilians died during Operation Gomorrah, after Bomber Command developed the proper scientific combination of incendiary and explosive bombs to create a firestorm. After the initial Soviet attack, Watkins describes British bombers on their way to retaliation. 'Their target: people like this.'

It's really no surprise, then, that The War Game was thought excessively subversive, and its suppression on explicitly political grounds defended in the press. '[T]he only possible effect of showing it to the British public at large would be ... to raise more unilateral disarmament recruits', the Evening News insisted.** The entirely correct accusation against Watkins was thus one succinctly expressed in the hideous German word Wehrkraftzersetzung, literally 'sapping of defensive strength': the danger of showing the film would be to incline the British people against any possibility of a war they'd been systematically misinformed about.

All of which might be interesting historically, but unfortunately the BBC is still at it. Acting as the mouthpiece of the government in the run-up to the conquest of Iraq, refusing to broadcast humanitarian appeals when the aggressor happens to be a is a British ally, shutting down commentators who wouldn't fall in line during the riots: more than ever, the BBC has a reputation for being regime media - structurally, not just incidentally. All the more reason to hold up The War Game as the little docu-drama all the Corporation's horses and all the Corporation's men couldn't bury.

*The BBC officially denies this screening ever happened.
**According to Watkins's website.

Metal on metal

I can't pinpoint the exact moment I became a metalhead, but as for so many young men of my generation my gateway drug was Linkin Park.

Within the metal scene this is not considered a cool thing to say, to put it mildly. These days I merrily dismiss nu metal as nothing more than gentrified grunge mixed with hip hop, a bunch of whingeing poseurs ripping off Rage Against the Machine with none of the revolutionary politics or musicianship.

But those of us in our mid-twenties now headbanging to blast beats? We liked Linkin Park. We liked Korn. Some of us, God help us, listened to Limp Bizkit. On this now famous graph, we all started on the far left. When I was fourteen, nu metal was the heaviest, angriest music I'd ever listened to.

Of course, that's because I didn't yet know the real thing. I came across 'The Wicker Man' by Iron Maiden by sheer chance, picked up The Number of the Beast and Brave New World, and the rest is history. Maiden opened the floodgates: from there, I discovered Rammstein, In Extremo, Metallica, Slayer, Avenged Sevenfold (another old shame) and eventually Black Sabbath, Sabaton, Manowar, Helloween, Finntroll, Arkona, Forefather, Falkenbach, Nachtmahr, Saxon, Nachtmystium...

The point is that I can't possibly approach Metal: A Headbanger's Journey neutrally. Thankfully, director Sam Dunn doesn't just recognise that: he comes from the same place. Dunn got into metal with Metallica, Maiden and Slayer in the eighties, and has been a metalhead ever since. His film is thus openly, enthusiastically partisan: just like the genre, it wears its heart on its sleeve in a big, proud and sometimes embarrassing way.

Dunn travels the world to speak to metal musicians and producers as well as attending Wacken in northern Germany, the world's largest metal festival. The interviews are almost entirely delightful. Dunn himself - an immensely likeable, gentle man who nonetheless likes some of the heaviest music on this middle-earth - has a lot to do with that: he's a sympathetic but smart interviewer, always giving his subjects room to breathe, never cutting them off or leading them.

Anyone still clinging to the aggressive, even brutish image associated with metal will be flummoxed by the sheer friendliness of the musicians - from Tony Iommi to Alice Cooper - that Dunn talks to. The tiny, wonderful Ronnie James Dio (of Black Sabbath, Rainbow, and Dio) and Iron Maiden's warm, articulate frontman Bruce Dickinson stand out, but for my money Rob Zombie is especially baffling. Here's someone who's directed some of the nastiest horror films in existence, and he seems like a great chap to have a pint with. (The gentlemen of Slipknot, who put forth intelligent, well-argued viewpoints while wearing horror masks, are another highlight.)

There are two interviews which are not what you'd call successful in ordinary terms, and both are with black metal musicians. First, Dunn tries to talk to Mayhem at Wacken, and only succeeds in provoking Necrobutcher to a profanity-laden drunken tirade against... something, while Blasphemer just sits there peacefully. The second odd encounter takes place in Norway, where Dunn speaks to Gaahl, then vocalist for black metal band Gorgoroth. The interview is worth watching:

DUNN: What is the primary ideology or primary ideas that fuel Gorgoroth's music?
(Pause.)
GAAHL: Satan. (takes sip of wine)
(Pause.)
DUNN: What does Satan embody, what does he represent?
(Pause.)
GAAHL: Freedom.

This is theatre. Gaahl is controlling the scene by the setting, his Pinteresque pauses and laconic answers. He's presenting Dunn with the most evil man in Norway. (Wish to hear Gaahl discuss fashion and art? Here you go, provided you read German.) What I can't figure out is whether it's a serious performance - a genuine attempt to impress the ideology of black metal on Dunn - or whether he's pulling the film crew's leg, contemptuous of the media's feeble attempts to comprehend the scene from the outside and thinking he might as well have some fun.

Whether Gaahl's technically accomplished performance in this scene is effective depends on whether you find the ideology of Norwegian black metal compelling. I for one haven't laughed so hard in a long time, and Alice Cooper gently pokes fun at the Norwegian bands' constant attempts to be more evil than everyone else in their rather serious devil-worship. (Gorgoroth split up at least in part because of theological differences between Gaahl and Infernus, the latter insisting Satan is a real, divine being, not a symbol of the self.)  But there is a more serious point, evident when Dunn asks about church burnings. Says Gaahl:

Church burnings and all these things are, of course, a thing that I support one hundred per cent. It's something that should have been done much more and will be done much more in the future. We have to remove every trace [of] what Christianity and the semitic roots have to offer this world. [...] Satanism is freedom for the individual to grow and to become the superman. Every man who is born to be king becomes king. Every man who is born to be a slave doesn't know Satan.

As Rolf Rasmussen, an assistant Lutheran minister at a church attacked by people associated with the black metal scene in the early nineties, points out, this is an uncomfortably elitist proposition. Though Gaahl is no fascist, the extreme individualism, worship of strength and associated contempt for other human beings associated with the scene help explain why there is a vocal neo-Nazi substratum in black metal.

Dunn rightly insists that outside the Norwegian scene, metal musicians have used satanic imagery primarily because it is transgressive and shocking, not because of any actual belief in the occult. (In Dunn's new television series Metal Evolution, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward are wonderfully frank about the use of occult symbols as a marketing ploy.) But I already knew that, and hence I was much more fascinated by Dunn's exploration of gender in metal.

Dunn observes that musicians and fans have historically been overwhelmingly male, but he doesn't stop there. As Dee Snider of Twisted Sister says, metal has tended to be both grotesquely macho and intensely homoerotic. (In all-male environments homophobia, machismo and anti-effeminacy often go hand in hand with all-out homoeroticism: watched 300 lately?) Rob Halford's leather outfits - generally preferred by metalheads to seemingly effeminate glam garb - originated in gay culture. Metal, Snider points out, creates a space in which men can still be men, by having another guy shake his nether regions at them.

But to say that metal is male is to ignore the women who've made their way into the culture over the years. Pamela Des Barres, 'the world's most famous groupie', rejects the claim that she was 'powerless' and 'objectified' because 'they're exactly where they want to be' - which may be true but nonetheless shows us the face of patriarchy. (Imagine the groupie gender-flipped.) Perhaps more positively, Dunn interviews Doro Pesch as well as members of Girlschool and Kittie on the pressures they've faced to be 'more feminine' and emphasise their looks.

Angela Gossow of Arch Enemy states that her tough stage persona as a death metal vocalist is important to her and has inspired young women. This is great, but I think Dunn is being a little too pat here, moving on to the next subject while leaving us with the impression that the gender divide has broken down. He observes that ultra-masculinity is associated with freedom, which should be the start of a debate - why is freedom gendered male? - rather than its end. As I see it, gender archetypes in the metal scene are still strong, with women encouraged to like symphonic metal and similar genres considered 'softer', while extreme metal is still overwhelmingly male. There's progress yet to be made, people.

A lot of time is devoted to the mainstream media's maligning of metal, the attempt during the eighties to brand the style as satanic and likely to inspire teens to foul deeds. While the footage of Dee Snider's testimony before congress is quite wonderful - and it's worth recalling a Gothic cathedral contains more images of demons, death & doom than any Cannibal Corpse cover - , my issue with this stretch of the film is that Dunn doesn't acknowledge that institutional attempts to suppress metal effectively ended in the early nineties. But the notion that metal is marginalised outsider music is hugely important to fans' and musicians' self-image: metal's counterculturality is constantly (re-)constructed, and those mechanisms would be deserving of their own documentary.

Dunn concludes that metal 'confronts what we'd rather ignore; it celebrates what we often deny; it indulges in what we fear most'. I think he's right. Metal shares that with horror (a reason, no doubt, why Rob Zombie is drawn to both genres). It deals with the ugly and abject, often transgressing boundaries and inverting established values: reckless abandon over the careful composure that would help our CV, aggression in a society that has monopolised violence. There is thus a countercultural core to metal: it is the Jungian shadow of a carefully maintained status quo, the garish reflection of societal aggression.

Let the little children come unto me

When I was seventeen, I spent three weeks serving as a 'senior camper' at a Christian summer camp. The purpose of Iwerne Holidays was to present the gospel to teenagers from independent schools in a fun environment including sports, excursions, and all sorts of activities. It was just like being a 'camp counselor' across the pond, except we weren't hacked to pieces by machete-wielding madmen.*

It was, however, nothing at all like Jesus Camp. Therein lies much of what makes the film so fascinating and irritating.

Jesus Camp, released in 2006, is an artifact of the culture wars of the 2000s, that appalling time in history when 'religion' (whatever that means) was at the forefront of public debate in the Anglo-Saxon world. The days of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, James Dobson and Pat Robertson, all of them thankfully increasingly irrelevant in an age where culture war has dissolved into the naked class struggle whose halo it was from the beginning.

Anyway! The film follows evangelical culture around a Pentecostal children's camp called 'Kids on Fire' in North Dakota. There, pastor Becky Fischer 'equips' children to be 'warriors for Christ' to 'take America back' by evangelism as well as fighting abortion and other forms of ungodliness in the public sphere. Directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady focus on three of the children: twelve-year-old Levi, homeschooled by his mother, who teaches him that evolution is a hoax; nine-year-old Rachael, who regularly engages in evangelism towards strangers; and ten-year-old Tory, who breakdances to Christian metal.

At Kids on Fire, these and other children are taught to be wary because 'the devil goes after the young' and to distrust secular entertainment ('Had it been in the Old Testament, Harry Potter would've been put to death!'). Among themselves, the children discuss their feelings about films and books, revealing their struggles with what they're being taught. In a service that can in good conscience only be described as mass hysteria, the children break down weeping and pledge to end abortion by political activism and asking God for 'righteous judges'.

We meet Levi again at New Life Church in Colorado Springs. In an interview, Pastor Ted Haggard expresses his delight at evangelical Christians forming a decisive voting bloc against homosexuality, abortion and the teaching of evolution. This scene, of course, now has a potency the filmmakers couldn't be aware of at the time: just a few months later, Haggard fell from grace when it was revealed he'd indulged in adulterous gay sex and illegal drugs for years.

As you'll have guessed by now, Jesus Camp is a liberal message picture. Despite the lack of a narrator, Ewing and Grady clearly think the formation of a political evangelicalism focused on anti-abortion, anti-homosexual 'family values' is a very bad thing, and I agree with them. Even so, I didn't really need the constant scare music they lather on every scene of Pentecostal worship. The snippets of Mike Papantonio's radio show, in which he criticises the Religious Right, are editorialising I welcome: it's good to see a Christian offer an alternative view to the one pushed by the film's subjects.

Even while Jesus Camp sternly disapproves of its subject matter, it's a respectful, humane film. When Becky Fischer says, offhand, 'I get exhausted doing this' while preparing for another session, it's the rawest, truest moment in the film. While I don't think we learn enough about them (which isn't really excusable, given the film's short running time), the children are never treated as less than full human beings with dreams and ambitions. Levi's worldview may be a mess of cruel lies - if global warming is true, ye are yet in your sins - but we learn to rejoice and mourn with him.

As such, the film's ostensibly simple message constantly rebels against the much more complex response the film actually induces in the viewer - especially if that viewer, like me, is himself an evangelical Christian. Becky Fischer's ministry is horrifying: she's convinced children need to be indoctrinated because most people's Weltanschauung is fixed from a young age, so better get in early; and she's worried because 'the enemy' - Islam - is supposedly training young children to blow themselves up, an amount of dedication she seems to view with envy rather than horror. (It was 2006, remember.)

In Fischer's call that children should be 'warriors' the Christian concept of spiritual warfare thus comes worryingly close to real, physical warfare. The 'Christian pledge of allegiance' one of the families recites at home has nothing to do with the gospel but a lot with a brand of Christian nationalism - something I can't imagine Jesus approving of. Faith in radical, counter-cultural grace - following an executed criminal - does not sit comfortably with colonising the public sphere because 'our nation was founded on Judaeo-Christian values' (Fischer).

Although the film is unmistakeably a product of its time - witness the scene in which the children are invited to bless a cardboard cutout of George Bush by stretching out their hands towards it - it seems prescient in other ways. The language of 'taking back America', now secularised in the Republican Right's crusade against ostensible Marxists, socialists, and liberals, is used here in religious garb. This rhetoric of national rebirth in the face of an ungodly, totalitarian government - a narrative that is a pack of lies, remember, no matter what we might feel about Obama otherwise - has given rise to the uniquely American permutations of fascism that are now flourishing at the even-loonier end of the Tea Party.

Jesus Camp runs into problems in failing to notice that Fischer and her ilk are engaged in intra-evangelical point-scoring, too: Rachael believes that churches with ordered, sedate services are 'dead'. The raucous Pentecostal manifestations of Kids on Fire - dancing, weeping, speaking in tongues, the whole vocabulary of the charismatic movement - would be regarded with bemusement if not outright horror by many evangelicals; fundamentalists, who trace their tradition back to the Puritans and disapprove of both dancing and what Jonathan Edwards called 'enthusiasm', would be especially appalled.**

The filmmakers don't seem to realise that the Religious Right is less a terrifying monolith than a collection of increasingly disparate forces provisionally united around certain political issues: opposing homosexuality, abortion and secularism, championing the military and the death penalty. Just like Fischer herself, Ewing and Grady never investigate the loci of structural power and privilege among their subjects: the power of leaders over followers, adults over children, men over women. Jesus Camp would be a richer film for it, but it remains an eye-opening portrait of the Religious Right.

*What did you expect? Being a Christian summer camp, the experience lacked the weed-smoking and fornication necessary to enrage Norfolk's homicidal maniac population.
**Perhaps more embarrassingly, many evangelicals would not be comfortable with a female pastor.

The earth a common treasury for all

I believe that the earth was created for all people, not just some. Not just the 'right' people. Not just the people with guns and money. When there is a conflict between the powerful and the disenfranchised, the oppressor and the oppressed - say, coal miners striking for better pay and conditions - there's only one side you can be on without losing your integrity, forever. To be neutral in such a situation is to side with injustice.

Forgive that grandiose introduction, gentle reader. You see, the only grounds on which anyone could criticise Harlan County U.S.A. - indeed, pretty much the film's only feature to have attracted condemnation - is that it refuses to even pretend neutrality in the manner of certain other documentaries: it stands squarely on the side of the miners. But that is a strength, not a weakness. A neutral film about the Harlan County War would be an immoral monstrosity.

Its passionate partisanship is a key part of Barbara Kopple's Oscar-winning 1976 documentary, but the film is also an artistic marvel. After a terrific sequence showing the everyday work routine of coal miners in Harlan County, Kentucky (Kevin Keating's cinematography in this scene alone would have made him a serious awards contender in a better world), the film's story begins with the miners at the Brookside Mine and Prep Plant affiliating to the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) in 1972. The miners demand the same contract other UMWA members enjoy, but Eastover Coal, owned by Duke Power, won't budge. Thus begins an extended strike.

The conflict escalates when the company uses Basil Collins and his hired thugs to keep the road open for scabs by setting up a machine gun and intimidating the pickets with clubs and firearms. Collins is the sort of character who'd have to be invented if he wasn't real: venal, brutish, egotistical and racist, he's exactly the man you want for your dirty work. As one reviewer noted, the film doesn't tell us what became of him: 'I don't say this because I worry about the man's welfare; I just want to know he’s dead so I can sleep at night.'

The sheriff and the courts are on the bosses' side, but the company scores an own goal when a young miner called Lawrence Jones is killed by a shotgun blast, leaving behind a sixteen-year-old wife and five-month-old daughter. (This leads to the film's most harrowing scene, in which a grieving and angry miner points out bits of Jones's brain matter on the asphalt.) Eventually the bosses fold and the Brookside miners get their UMWA contract.

Barbara Kopple and her team lived with miners' families for years, observing almost every aspect of their political organisation. In the cinéma vérité style the film adopts, the camera is not a neutral observer but an active participant; Kopple makes no effort to hide the numerous moments in which her presence affects events, leading, for example, to Collins attempting to conceal a pistol in his trouser pocket. In a celebrated scene, the pickets are attacked before dawn by the gun thugs, shots are fired, and Kopple is pushed to the ground with the camera.

'Know that nigger?', yells Collins in reference to an African-American picket. 'That "nigger" is a better man than you'll ever be', replies a miner. Traditional structures of marginalisation and domination among the strikers break down. 'We done make every colour when we went in; you all be look the same when you came out', says a black miner about the thick layer of coal dust and grime on their faces at the end of a shift. 'We's all brothers when we out', replies his white colleague, and the easy banter and obvious affection between the men gives the lie to the drivel Blue Labour and the Heil feed us about working-class racism.

Not, of course, that all's rosy among the workers. Kopple does not gloss over the internal conflicts and personal recriminations that break out when the going gets tough, but the community emerges strengthened as it is transformed by struggle. Patriarchy takes a back seat when women, who turn out to be more energetic than the men, begin to coordinate the strike. Chain-smoking Sudie Crusenberry, a mother of two whose husband is retired with black lung, reignites the flagging struggle; Lois Scott becomes the effective leader before long, brave enough to face down Collins and his thugs and with righteous wrath to spare.

Even though the strike is victorious, Kopple ends Harlan County U.S.A. on an ambiguous note. As the reform movement within the national leadership of the UMWA crumbles, the miners realise they may be banned from conducting future strikes without approval at the national level. But Kopple's point is that the struggle itself - the Luxemburgian dialectic of spontaneity and organisation we see operating throughout Harlan County U.S.A. - is crucial even when it is defeated. As one of my favourite passages in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath puts it (forgive the gendered language and philosophical idiosyncrasy):

For man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments. This you may say of man - when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back... This you may know when the bombs plummet out of the black planes on the market place, when prisoners are stuck like pigs, when the crushed bodies drain filthily in the dust. You may know it in this way. If the step were not being taken, if the stumbling-forward ache were not alive, the bombs would not fall, the throats would not be cut. Fear the time when the bombs stop falling while the bombers live - for every bomb is proof that the spirit has not died. And fear the time when the strikes stop while the great owners live - for every little beaten strike is proof that the step is being taken. And this you can know - fear the time when Manself will not suffer and die for a concept, for this one quality is the foundation of Manself, and this one quality is man, distinctive in the universe. (Ch. 14)

Kopple never once abandons her story's particularity for the great forward march of history, but she does focus on the miners' political organisation at the expense of their personal lives. Considering she lived with her subjects, it's remarkable how rarely we see children or the inside of people's homes. There are, instead, a lot of meetings and interviews with several generations of Harlan people, from veterans of the vicious struggles of the 1930s to the teenage wife. 'The union' and solidarity have been fought and died for, and as a result they're deeply embedded.

Life in Harlan was hard even in the 1970s, before Reaganomics took their toll; in the film, the county looks like a third-world enclave inside the West. The legacy of neoliberalism was to bring the Global South home, globalising sharp contrasts between the rich and the poor. Kopple's miners have no confidence in government: they're fully aware that they'll only get what they fight for themselves. Call it all things held in common; call it democracy. Call it freedom: the freedom countless people have fought and died for through the ages, their names forgotten because they robbed, evicted and bombed no-one.