"The Tailenders" records Bible stories in every language. By Robert Abele With purpose Adele Horne's eye-and-ear-opening documentary "The Tailenders," which L.A. Filmforum is showing Sunday with Horne in person, is a movie about the rigor of a message, but framed with open-ended questions. It focuses on the studious work of Global Recordings Network, a missionary outfit founded in L.A. in 1939 that has striven to record Bible stories in the more than 8,000 languages to be found on Earth, an effort that has helped preserve dialects in every corner of the Earth. They're at over 5,500 so far, and Horne follows the group to the Solomon Islands, Mexico, India and the migrant fields of Baja California to document their ingeniously low-tech, high-resolve methods of controlling mass communication, but also how their shrewdly marketed evangelism fits in -- and/or doesn't -- with the economic realities, political concerns and survival issues of indigenous peoples. A movie about no less than sound and our world, it is by turns ghostly, raw, beautiful and perplexing, like the ingeniously strange handmade record players and tape machines GRN invents, or the visualization of sonic ripples. A nominee for this year's Independent Spirit Awards' Truer Than Fiction award, Horne's "The Tailenders" is a bewitchingly artful connect-the-dots achievement. |
||||
| home | ||||