DVD of the Week: “Marjoe”

Sarah Kernochan and Howard Smith’s extraordinary and seemingly effortless 1972 documentary “Marjoe” (which I discuss in this clip), won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. It follows the former child preacher Marjoe Gortner on his comeback tour through Pentecostal churches in the South, which was arranged in conjunction with the movie, so that Gortner, who had lost his faith, could expose the business of religion and challenge the influence and authority of celebrity evangelists. Gortner talks about how he’ll perform, then performs, and then discusses the performance he just gave, sometimes lapsing back into the mode of performance, by habit and by affinity. It’s the story of a natural who comes to recognize just how trained and habituated his nature had become, and finding himself gifted at an art that, with the age of reason, he had come to repudiate. The movie’s seamless coherence is a tribute to its directors’ deft and graceful artistry. It’s the subject—Gortner himself and his electrifying public persona—that seems to do the work. The filmmakers saw the inherent Möbius-strip multiplicity of the story and caught it on the wing. It’s hard to imagine a film that takes as harsh a view of organized religion getting such institutional acclaim today. At her blog, Sarah Kernochan writes that the distributor “refused to open it in any city south of Des Moines” for fear of backlash from the Bible Belt. She also tells the story of the movie’s disappearance from circulation for decades and her fortuitous rediscovery, which allowed it to be restored and reissued, in 2005.