I went to see Other Cinema's "Cult Explosion" series last night; a series of films, videos, and slide shows made by and for outsider religious groups. While waiting in line, we spotted Rick Prelinger, coiner of the term "ephemeral films" and a leading scholar and archivist of instructional and institutional films. (As seen in several Talking Heads videos) The films were showing at ATA, a radical filmmakers Co-Op where a dozen or so people live to make and screen wierd footage.
Some Co-Op resident was assaulting passersby with a violent harangue against
the infiltrationist dot com yuppies who are overruning San Francisco. I tried
not to take it too personally.
The films themselves were astounding. The first was an internal instructional
video for the complete Scientology testing procedure.
Young Man [cocky]
"Everyone tells me I'm a very hard sell."
Tester [slyly]
"Do the girls tell you that?"
Young Man
"Wha?! But I... I... [crestfallen] yes, they do."
What followed was a mind-boggling early-70s cartoon from the Mormons on the
three wives of Jesus and the state of polygamous Godhood that all Mormon men
aspire to. We all laughed derisively. As it ended, some wag at the back of
the (30 seat) theater said, "Yeah, let's all make fun of the Jews now."
Point well taken.
Everything that followed was fascinating and creepy in equal measures--especially
Pat Robertson's 700 Club coverage of the Burning Man festival, an attack on
Christian Science made by evangelical fundamentalists, a cartoon extrapolation
of a Jack T. Chick pamphlet, a celebration of the myth and majesty of Freemasonry,
and a brief and thoroughly incoherent discussion on The Purpose of Hunger
from the est organization. ("The Hunger Project is not about solutions.
It's not about fixing up the problem. It's not anybody's good idea. The Hunger
Project is about creating a context--creating the end of hunger as an idea
whose time has come. As a function of The Hunger Project, we will learn what
we need to know to make an idea's time come; then we will know how to make
the world work.")
The most "impressive" piece was a video clip on Holy Laughter; a
revivalist movement in which adherents shriek with uncontrollably hysterical
laughter rather than simply speak in tongues. Over a constant and deafening
din of Holy Laughter, 450 lb. preacher Kenneth Hagin is literally carried
around by four chuckling assistants as he gasps for breath and shrieks, "P-shew!
P-shew! Be drunk HAW HAW on the spirit! P-shew!" and "P-shew! Drunks
fall down! P-shew! Drunks. Fall. DAIOWN! HAW HAW!" His parishioners slither
out of their seats onto the floor, leap up and do Happy Feet dances, and topple
like dominoes whenever Hagin lays the anointing hand of hilarity upon them.
What's priceless are the small signs of calculation that creep into this display of unbridled mass psychosis: some begin to copy the gesticulations of wild abandon made by other more adventurous congregants, one woman carefully holds her skirt down as she laughs uncertainly and slides out of her seat, and in a Klute-like flourish Reverend Hagin sneaks a peek at his watch between fits of manic laughter.