http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/25/arts/25heff.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

July 25, 2006

TV Review
‘P.O.V.’ on PBS: How Missionaries Spread the Word, and U.S. Capitalism

By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

Are evangelical missionaries good or bad? That’s the question in tonight’s
PBS documentary, “The Tailenders.” The missionaries’ smugness and
salesmanship tend to irritate other humanitarian workers, who typically see
themselves as more respectful of the people they’re tending to. What’s
more, the program implies, silencing the stomping beats of, say, the
Solomon Islands in favor of pallid “Jesus Loves Me” singalongs seems just
wrong.

But more disturbing than this, the documentary contends, is the
psychological and spiritual danger that many progressives believe is
wrought by missionaries, who swipe from indigenous people their happy,
peaceful ways and stick them instead with the greed, selfishness, jealousy
and wrecked natural landscapes known to be the key features of global
industrial capitalism.

Despite a century of such complaints, however, Protestant missionaries
persist. And they’re dogged. They dress in uncool hiking clothes and pack
up uncool backpacks and buses with uncool food and uncool Bibles and
venture way the heck into the jungle where they — and this is the subject
of “The Tailenders” — learn thorny indigenous languages so they can
actually talk with people who have never heard of America, capitalism,
jihad, McWorld or Jesus Christ. Missionaries may be the most parochial and
audacious avatars of our modern world.

Still, after tonight’s effort to wrestle with this paradox, you will not
know for sure whether missionaries are good or bad. But you will talk about
it. This gorgeous, inspired and gutsy film, the first feature documentary
by Adele Horne, who also produces video art, opens up new ideological
vistas on religion, technology and globalization. It dares viewers not to
be surprised by it.

The focus of “The Tailenders” is the Global Recordings Network, founded in
1939 in Los Angeles by an evangelical named Joy Ridderhof. She wanted to
disseminate Bible stories via phonographs and gramophones. Still
photographs bring to life her adventures among those she aimed to convert;
there she crouches, pale and delicate, with various less-delicate-looking
figures in jungles and on beaches, marveling at a tape recorder. Of the
8,000 languages and dialects believed to exist, Global Recordings has now
produced Christian propaganda in more than 5,485 of them. No linguistics
department could pull this off.

The idea of releasing disembodied sound on unsuspecting people — like God
in the burning bush — clearly fascinates Ms. Horne, who conveys an
infectious sense of “this blows my mind.” The ingenious hand-cranked audio
devices, engineered to be usable by people without electricity, are
presented with the amazement that only a filmmaker pious about audiovisual
technology could convey.

“Every physical movement and action reverberates throughout time and space,
for good or ill,” says the spacey- and sad-sounding narrator, finding an
analogy for the way sound echoes. “The ripple on the ocean’s surface caused
by a gentle breeze and the deeper furrow of a ponderous slave ship are
equally indelible.”

This airy poetry is anchored by down-to-earth reporting in India, Mexico
and the Solomon Islands. At one point, a missionary is translating a
message about Christian redemption into dialect. A native speaker finds an
error. As he tells the missionary, the message now says, “We will wash away
God’s sins.” Something needs to change.

Less effective than the vérité and the impressionistic voice-over are Ms.
Horne’s sporadic efforts to jam her material into an interpretive
framework. At the end of the film, which has presented disembodied audio as
a religion unto itself, Ms. Horne seems to balk at her own originality and
retreat into clichés.

The voice-over says: “Where Protestant missionaries go, industrial
capitalism follows. To convert to evangelicalism is to replace indigenous
collectivity with the pursuit of individual economic gain.”

And then there’s a lament for what’s lost. One of the converts says that
new Protestants are shunned by their villages; they’ve forgone the religion
of their parents. Only if you’ve been watching closely will you realize
that that lost religion is Roman Catholicism. These congregants have not
lost tribal practices, they’ve just moved on from the last wave of colonial
proselytizing.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company