New York Times - ‘American Heretics’ Review:Challenging Religious Orthodoxies in Oklahoma
A documentary showcases progressive Christian leaders who don’t align with their state’s conservative leanings.
The Rev. Robin R. Meyers, who led his Oklahoma City congregation in a vote on whether to become a sanctuary church for undocumented immigrants, in “American Heretics: The Politics of the Gospel.”CreditJason/Abramorama
July 11, 2019
American Heretics: The Politics of the GospelDirected by Jeanine Isabel ButlerDocumentary
“American Heretics: The Politics of the Gospel” doesn’t break ground cinematically, but it is eye-opening in other ways. This documentary from Jeanine Isabel Butler showcases progressive Christian leaders in Oklahoma whose ideas run counter to the state’s conservative political leanings.
The Rev. Robin R. Meyers leads his Oklahoma City congregation in a vote on whether to become a sanctuary church for undocumented immigrants. The Rev. Lori Walke, who preaches alongside Meyers, describes how her beliefs evolved in college. When she delivers an invocation at the State Capitol, she reminds lawmakers of “low-income Oklahomans who need health care for their families” and of “teachers who need money, not just the motto printed on it.” Bishop Carlton Pearson, who was played by Chiwetel Ejiofor in the film “Come Sunday,” was deemed a heretic after he challenged the Evangelical teaching that anyone who isn’t “saved” would be condemned to hell.
Bernard Brandon Scott, a scholar of the New Testament, offers historical and biblical support for the views they express. Other illuminating material includes a discussion of the Tulsa race riot of 1921, when as many as 300 people were killed in a thriving neighborhood known as “Black Wall Street.” You might be surprised to learn that voices in the Southern Baptist Convention initially praised the Roe v. Wade decision.
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A closing title card indicates that Evangelical leaders who don’t share the views presented here declined to be interviewed or didn’t respond to requests for comment. That absence leaves unanswered questions. How common is progressive Christianity in Oklahoma? The answer would provide context for Pearson’s prediction that his church and Meyers’s will be the “premier megachurches in the next 10 years.”
American Heretics: The Politics of the Gospel
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes.
American Heretics: The Politics of the Gospel
Director Jeanine Isabel Butler
Writers Catherine Lynn Butler, Jeanine Isabel Butler
Stars Robin Meyers, Carlton Pearson, Robin Lavanhar, Lori Walke, Bernard Brandon Scott
Genre Documentary
American Heretics: The Politics of the GospelDirected by Jeanine Isabel ButlerDocumentary
MOVIE NATION REVIEWS AMERICAN HERETICS: POLITICS OF THE GOSPEL
Documentary Review — “American Heretics: The Politics of the Gospel”
Posted on July 10, 2019
Oh, to be a “liberal” Christian in Oklahoma, where, as the song almost says, “the dogma’s as high as an elephant’s eye,” and because its believers envision a life in the sky.
“American Heretics: The Politics of the Gospel” finds isolated outposts there, where courageous preachers can’t help but take the argument that God isn’t a Republican right to its most fervent believers.
Filmmakers Jeanine Butler and Catherine Butler visit a couple of urban congregations in this mostly rural “reddest of red states,” talk to pastors, a theologian, a state representative and others, all in an effort to define what “politics” attach themselves to the founders of Christianity, and how that differs from the Evangelicals who have defined Christianity as a patriarchal, hierarchical “parental and punitive” religion, which it wasn’t as related in the stories of the Bible.
As the film’s theologian, Dr. Bernard Brandon Scott says, quoting Luke 12:57 — “Why do you not judge for yourself what is right?”
The movie is framed by events at one of the most “liberal” congregations in the state, Mayflower Congregational (UCC) Church in Oklahoma City.
When Rev. Robin R. Meyers, who later was the author of “Why the Christian Right is Wrong,” arrived, he ran into trouble right off. Merely referring to the church as “liberal” was verboten.
“Liberal” means “tolerant” and “open minded” to him, he explained to irate congregants. It means “The Hated Other” to much of Fundamentalist America, especially in The Sooner State.
“In Oklahoma, you can be a Democrat, or you can be a Christian,” he jokes that he learned. “But you can’t be both.”
“American Heretics” profiles several folks you might describe as Next Generation Fundamentalists. They’re willing to go back into the historical record, parse the Bible for ways it is out of date (“Slavery was totally OK in the Bible.”) and ways it has been twisted by the schismatic Southern Baptists, still, in their eyes, re-fighting the Civil War in modern America.
“Nobody has the absolute truth,” Rev. Meyers says. “That would be idolatry…If you say you’re certain, then you need no faith.”
Robert P. Jones, author of “The End of White Christian America,” serves up a history of Evangelic political activism, how “17% of the population, 26% of voters in the last election” were energized by the Bob Jones University inter-racial dating ban lawsuit before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1982. Jerry Falwell, who had been sharply critical of preachers using the pulpit for politics when it was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. urging a “march to the ballot box,” dove in head first.
This population is “over-represented at the ballot box” Jones notes, and in state legislatures, where states such as Oklahoma have long standing “chaplain’s opening prayer” policies designed to exclude other religions, and have become even narrower in giving that forum to conservative Evangelicals in many states.
One of the “Heretics” profiled here is Lori Walke, and we see her struggle — she’s a co-pastor at Mayflower and married to a Democratic legislator — to get equal time before Oklahoma’s legislators, where she offers up her prayer for tolerance, help for the underprivileged, urging votes that will create a Biblical “city upon a hill” to people who have cut education and social services funding and stymied efforts to raise the minimum wage.
The most chilling footage in “American Heretics” isn’t still shots from the infamous “Tulsa Race Riots” of 1921, which was actually a white lynch mob that destroyed the city’s black business district and killed many of its residents.
No, after hearing that this is a “family values” state that is at war with families, seeing the capital rotunda, where the names of inhuman giant companies are carved into its walls — Halliburton, Phillips Petroleum, Hobby Lobby Stores — simply hurts the heart, and makes one wonder “WTF, OK?”
Walke, a one-time college basketball player, remembers the day she knew she had to find a new church, hearing a preacher blistering New Orleans by saying Hurricane Katrina was “punishment from God” for the city’s sins.
We hear disgraced former attorney general Jeff Sessions quoting St. Paul that “God has ordained the government for His purposes,” urging obedience to a system that has rendered America’s divide between rich and poor the greatest in its history, see samples of the fire-and-brimstone rage of vintage sermons at the birth of The Moral Majority and the snide, crude jokes of its current leading light, Jerry Falwell Jr.
The natural reaction for most would be despair. What if all of America turns into Oklahoma?
Then Bishop Carlton Pearson of All Souls Unitarian in Tulsa tells his story. He was first lieutenant to Pentecostal populist Oral Roberts, preaching and leading the choir on national telecasts, moving out to his own church but still all but the anointed successor to Roberts.
Roberts, he says, was an “underdog who rooted for the underdog.” Little of this cozying up to the cynical, rich and powerful of the Falwells and Robertsons. Roberts wasn’t determined to be a kingmaker like those two most famous of his peers.
And then we hear how Pearson got into trouble. He dared tell his Tulsa congregation that “Hell does not exist.”
We’ve already heard Dr. Scott takes us back to that hot button issue for Christian fundamentalists, the Emperor Constantine’s Council of Nicaea, where whole books of the then-new Bible were tossed out. The absence of the Book of Mary helped erase centuries of female involvement and leadership — documented in crypt and catacomb painting — from the newly, more patriarchal Church.
Scott has made the case that this council and the “Nicene Creed” that came from it “invented Christianity,” shifting the Jewish teachings of Jesus, a religion of “”praxis,” your belief is what you do, your actions, to a Christianity of “belief” — what you say you believe is what matters.
And as Pearson and Scott point out, the Hell of Fundamentalism, with its fear and retribution, pretty much doesn’t exist in the Bible in any form.
There is a “Politics of the Gospel,” everybody here argues. And it’s not the one that’s holding the stage and the media’s attention via white Evangelical Protestants and their adoration of a “vengeful god figure,” Donald Trump.
That’s a lot of ground to cover in a 90 minute documentary, and “American Heretics” leaves much merely uncovered, not wholly explored. The filmmakers say they reached out to Oral Roberts U. and others for balance, but nobody from the comswrvstove doce took them up on their offer. A few detours turn into blind alleys, though the sermons and music served up here are uplifting and entertaining.
An interesting device is using the debate in Mayflower over whether to become a “sanctuary church” for immigrants to frame the last half of “Heretics.”
The Butlers’ film deserves a place in the growing national conversation about what has happened in America with the cultish connection between white Evangelicals and the most godless person ever to hold high office in the U.S., the damage they’re doing to society, the economy, the environment and their own faith with their slavish desire to simply “own the libs” via their embrace or tolerance of treachery, bigotry, intimidation and treason.
“American Heretics” shines a light on those who would be a candle in the midst of the Medieval darkness of modern, white Southern American Christianity.
MPAA Rating: unrated
Credits: Directed by Jeanine Butler, Catherine Butler.
An Abramorama release
Running time: 1:27
VARIETY REVIEWS AMERICAN HERETICS: POLITICS OF THE GOSPEL
Owen Gleiberman
July 9, 2019 10:14PM PDT
Why have liberal Christians become an oxymoron? A documentary looks for the answer, all the while arguing that they may be the future.
“American Heretics: The Politics of the Gospel” is a documentary about an idea that’s now such a contradiction in American culture that it has come to feel like an oxymoron, or maybe an M.C. Escher brain teaser: liberal Christianity. I mean liberal in the classic sense (per Webster’s: “marked by generosity…associated with ideals of individual especially economic freedom [and] greater individual participation in government”), and I also mean Christianity in the classic sense (the teachings of Jesus Christ). It’s far from counterintuitive to point out that those two things actually fit rather well together.
So why is the political face of Christianity in the United States today exclusively, and dogmatically, Republican? Is it because Jesus himself would have cheered on tax breaks for corporations? Or would have embraced New York Times headlines like “‘There is a Stench’: Soiled Clothes and No Baths for Migrant Children at a Texas Center”? (Oh, sorry, I forgot: Jesus would never have read The New York Times. He’d be a Fox News Messiah all the way.)
The central figure in “American Heretics” is Dr. Robin Meyers, the senior pastor of the Mayflower Congregational UCC Church in Oklahoma City, Okla., who wrote the fearless book “Why the Christian Right is Wrong” and has a singular knack for using words to reveal the bent morality of those who would claim the moral high ground. “The interesting thing about people who say they’re certain,” he observes, “is then you need no faith.” He’s talking about those on the right who have transformed Christianity into a closed system, a faith-based version of circular reasoning that reduces the world to two camps: Join with us, or you’re the enemy. But Meyers is also referencing what Christianity was before the absolutists got their ideological mitts all over it: a religion of mystery, of doubt as well as faith, of pain as well as salvation.
The new mass fundamentalism doesn’t hide its priorities. They’re as real as the 40-karat rotating globe that sits behind the superstar preacher Joel Osteen during his megachurch sermons. (Jesus would have looked at that aspirational luxury orb and wept.) But in demonizing the Democratic Party, the Christian right has made it virtually impossible for liberal Christians to declare their faith in an organized fashion without feeling like…well, heretics.
Jeanine Isabel Butler, the director, co-writer, and co-producer of “American Heretics,” shot her movie in Oklahoma because it’s one of the reddest states in America, without a single county that voted for Obama (or didn’t vote for Trump). The religion in Oklahoma is largely Southern Baptist, and Meyers, who has the high whitish hair and avuncular beard of an aging Christian summer-camp counselor, says, “I’m always joking that in Oklahoma you can be a Democrat or you can be a Christian, but you can’t be both. That would be peculiar.” But it’s the conviction of Meyers, and of other Oklahoma gadflies with congregations who the film profiles, that the movement of Christians against the Christian right is more than an anomaly — it’s an earthquake waiting to happen.
Bishop Carlton Pearson, a fourth-generation Pentecostal who was the associate evangelist on Oral Roberts’ TV ministry during the ’70s, is now a liberal outlier, and he says it makes total sense that Christianity has forged an alliance with Donald Trump, since Trump comes close to the image of an angry vengeful (white) god that the new Christianity, with its “very parental and very punitive” model of morality, is selling. Pearson was a rising star of televangelism until he embraced the gospel of universal reconciliation and began to downplay the centrality of hell in Christian theology. In truth, there isn’t much of an image of hell in the Bible; most of the imagery we think of comes from Dante. But Pearson became a pariah, even within his own family, although he speaks here with great eloquence of finding “a new spiritual paradigm,” and predicts that churches like the Mayflower will be the new megachurches in the next 10 years.
“American Heretics” is, among other things, a fascinating history lesson, especially when Bernard Brandon Scott, professor emeritus of Oklahoma’s Phillips Theological Seminary, discusses the ways that the codification of Evangelical righteousness is based on deeply flawed notions of how those certainties first came into being. Scott, who’s like a wilier Joseph Campbell, talks about what a scrappy and disparate and, at times, random document the New Testament is — and makes the point that the be-all-and-end-all faith now placed in the Bible as the defining totem of Jesus’ teachings is misplaced, since the Bible as we know it didn’t even exist until several centuries after Jesus’ death. Scott points out that in the formative years of Christianity there were female apostles, as well as images in catacombs all over the world of women praying. But that image of a devout woman as the archetypal Christian began to be suppressed with the council of Constantine, who sought to unify the Roman Empire and used the Nicene Creed as a thunderous manifesto that shifted Christianity from a religion of doing to a religion of, simply, believing.
“American Heretics” is eye-opening, but it’s never explosive. What it shows us is several devoted men, and one devoted woman, the Reverend Lori Walke, trying to lead a movement by staying true to their own idealism. Yet the film shies away from showing us the conflict between liberal Christianity and the target-happy forces of the Christian right. In this movie, the movement that was started by leaders like Jerry Falwell in the late ’70s consists of people who have sold out Christianity (and maybe themselves) by turning it into a moral and political battering ram. It would be foolish to deny, though, that they’re more mesmerizing than the do-gooder heroes. It’s far more dramatic and commanding to see them flip “compassion” on its head, turning it into a movement of showbiz wrath, than to watch a bunch of true Christians try and save the world the old-fashioned way, one soul at a time.
Film 'American Heretics: The Politics of the Gospel' will make deadCenter debut
Considered anomalies on the conservative religious landscape of Oklahoma, the Rev. Robin Meyers and Bishop Carlton Pearson are subjects of a new documentary making its debut Saturday at the deadCenter Film Festival.
"American Heretics: The Politics of the Gospel," which is directed by Emmy Award winners Jeanine and Catherine Butler with Butler Films, takes the audience to "the Buckle of the Bible Belt where a group of defiant Oklahomans are rising up to challenge deeply rooted fundamentalist Christian doctrine," according to a film synopsis on the documentary's website.
Meyers, senior pastor of Mayflower Congregational Church-United Church of Christ in Oklahoma City, said the film evolved from a chance encounter he had with the directors, particularly Catherine Butler, at a religious conference in San Francisco.
"I just started talking about Mayflower and some of the things we were doing and I think she was a bit surprised that that was possible, the things that I was telling her, in Oklahoma. I think she got curious about it and one thing led to another," he said.
Meyers said for a long time, Mayflower has stood out from among a sea of predominantly conservative churches in the state. As he described the congregation to the filmmakers, they became more curious about it.
"We've been here a long time and we've been doing an unconventional kind of ministry for a very long time and a very unlikely kind of ministry, in that we are unapologetically progressive people but we're also Christians," he said. "We are largely Democrats, but we are also Christians. We are very much into progressive politics and women's rights and gay rights and immigrant rights and yet we live in Oklahoma."
Jeanine Butler said the more they learned about Meyers, Mayflower and some others, the more intrigued they became.
"We had the good fortune of meeting some of our characters on another project and the more we learned about them, the more we realized it provided an extremely interesting conversation that resonated not just in the state but around the country at a time when we are extremely polarized as a country, across lines of religion and politics and race," she said in an interview.
"So the idea of it sprouted earlier on, and as we got to know them and as we got to know what was happening in Oklahoma, we thought now would be a good time to tell this story."
Meyers said the Butlers came to Oklahoma to do interviews and learn more about Mayflower's work in the community. As they began filming, they met more people connected to Mayflower and also the Rev. Marlin Lavanhar, senior pastor of All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church in Tulsa. The filmmakers decided to widen the scope of the film project.
"It ended up being a film about two churches, Mayflower and All Souls," Meyers said.
The directors met Pearson through Lavanhar, who had made waves in 2008 when he invited Pearson and the remnant of his mostly black Pentecostal megachurch flock to join the predominantly white congregation at All Souls. Pearson is currently an affiliate minister at the church.
Well-known in Oklahoma, Pearson was considered the late televangelist Oral Roberts' "son in the ministry" and he led a fast-growing megachurch called Higher Dimensions in Tulsa until he began espousing a theology he called the "Gospel of Inclusion," that questioned the existence of Hell, among other things. His Gospel of Inclusion put him crosswise with Roberts and numerous Christian pastors and theologians who eventually branded him a heretic.
The movie about Pearson and what he described as his "journey into the New Thought community" premiered in 2018. The feature film "Come Sunday" included actors Chiwetel Ejiofor as Pearson and Martin Sheen as Oral Roberts.
Other Oklahomans featured in the film include the Rev. Lori Walke, Meyers' associate pastor at Mayflower Congregational Church; her husband, State Rep. Collin Walke, D-Oklahoma City; Bernard Brandon Scott, a New Testament scholar and former longtime Phillips Theological Seminary professor; and Nehemiah D. Frank, founder and executive editor of The Black Wall Street Times and teacher at Sankofa School of the Performing Arts in Tulsa. Robert Jones, founding chief executive officer of Public Religion Research Institute, a frequent commentator on culture, religion and politics, is also featured in the film.
Meyers said he thinks the documentary will enlighten people about ministries that differ from the predominant religious culture in Oklahoma.
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"There's commentary all through it about progressive Christianity," he said. "Most people in Oklahoma don't know what it is and I think the net effect of the film — that there is such a thing, it can be practiced in the state and most surprisingly, it can be successful."
Going on
"American Heretics" at deadCenter Film Festival
Showings: 2 p.m. Saturday, American Fidelity Theater at Harkins Theatres Bricktown 16, 150 E Reno; 2 p.m. Sunday, Oklahoma City Musuem of Art, 415 Couch Drive.
American Heretics - Selected for Telluride MountainFilm Festival
American Heretics: The Politics of the Gospel takes audiences into the buckle of Bible belt where a group of defiant Oklahomans are rising up to challenge deeply rooted fundamentalist Christian doctrine. Labeled as “heretics” for their beliefs and actions, they refuse to wield their faith as a sword sharpened by literal interpretations of the Bible. Especially those interpretations that continue to justify nationalism and hack away at landmark civil rights protections for women, minorities, immigrants, and the LGBTQ communities. These American Heretics are still interested in saving you from hell, but it’s the earthly one, where poverty, discrimination and nationalism oppress those “who are the least among us.”
World Premiere
Not all American Christians are conservative, not even in Oklahoma, where evangelical Christianity is a dominant religious affiliation. Rev. Robin Meyers proudly claims the mantle of liberalism. He and a handful of other “heretics” in his conservative state think deeply about early Christianity, American history, what the Bible says and doesn’t say and how evangelical Christianity has shaped, or misshaped, American politics. “Something is really, really wrong with our approach to religion,” Meyers says, citing gospel to decry right-wing politics, driven, in his view, by evangelical Christianity. American Heretics sheds blessed light on this issue. Who are the heretics here? The subjects of this film, or the evangelical church they expose for its rigid dogma of authoritarianism, intolerance and bigotry?
NEWSEUM - 1968 "And Justice for All,"
Recent Butlerfilms projects include working with the Newseum on two original Newseum-produced films, “And Justice for All,” about the protests by track and field medal winners John Carlos and Tommie Smith at the 1968 Olympics that resonate with today’s NFL protests, and "The Pulitzer Prize at 100," which won the Gold Medal at the 2017 New York Festivals World's Best TV and Films.
The Pulitzer Prizes at 100 was Awarded a Gold Medal at the 2017 New York Festival's World’s Best TV & Films.
"How do you cover 100 years in 12½ minutes? That was the question when we set out to make a short film to celebrate the centennial of the Pulitzer Prizes.
We wanted a film that paid homage to the past but also conveyed the present and pointed to the future. We wanted the film to reflect the four themes of our celebration, all subjects of much prize-winning work over the years: Social Justice and Equality, War and Peace, The Presidency, and Power and Accountability.
We turned to the Newseum in Washington, D.C., for help with the film. We invited several Pulitzer Prize winners for on-camera interviews. Jeanine Butler, who heads Butlerfilms, produced and directed the film."
Mike Pride, Administrator, The Pulitzer Prizes
The Pulitzer Prizes at 100 was Awarded a Gold Medal at the 2017 New York Festival's World’s Best TV & Films.
Center for Documentary Studies exhibition: LOUISE ROSSKAM AND THE DOCUMENTARY TRADITION
Jeanine Butler, Executive Producer / Writer
The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University
A fifteen minute retrospective to accompany Center for Documentary Studies exhibition on the work of F.S.A. photographer Louise Rosskam (1910–2003) is one of the elusive pioneers of what some have called the golden age of documentary photography, whose strong work helped to shape the documentary aesthetic from the 1930s through the 1950s via its publication in widely circulated newspapers, magazines, and books. Working for more than three decades in collaboration with her husband, Edwin (1903–1985), she photographed for the Farm Security Administration, the Office of War Information, the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, the Puerto Rico Office of Information, and the New Jersey Department of Education. Few of her images bear individual credit — she has explained that at the time the teamwork and the greater social purpose of the camera projects were always paramount.
A Life in Photography is the first contextual exhibition to feature this gifted photographer’s contributions to the larger field of social reform photography.
New York Times - "Recalling a Mission to Capture an Era’s Misery"
“I wanted to introduce a new generation to some of these photographs and the amazing stories that went with them,” said Jeanine Isabel Butler, who wrote and directed the film
Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother” introduced one segment of America to another.CreditLibrary of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
By FELICIA R. LEEAUG. 17, 2008
“Migrant Mother,” Dorothea Lange’s image of a weathered, grimy Depression-era woman in California surrounded by her children, is one of the most famous photographs of the 20th century, as is “Fleeing a Dust Storm,” Arthur Rothstein’s shot of a farmer and his two young sons in the Oklahoma Dust Bowl whipped by the wind, a shack in the background.
The politics and the photographers who shaped those images under the auspices of the federal Farm Security Administration come to life in “Documenting the Face of America: Roy Stryker and the F.S.A./O.W.I. Photographers,” an hourlong documentary on most PBS stations Monday night. The film shows how Mr. Stryker turned a small government agency’s New Deal project to document poverty into a visual anthology of thousands of images of American life in the 1930s and early ’40s that helped shape modern documentary photography; more than 160,000 are now at the Library of Congress.
Before television or the Internet, when many Americans lacked even a radio, the photographs told stories that would have remained elusive to those out of eyeball range. Ms. Lange and Mr. Rothstein, along with celebrated figures like Walker Evans and Gordon Parks, used their cameras to preserve scenes of winding bread lines, dirty-faced families in front of their ramshackle farmhouses or in jalopies with their possessions piled high, as well as the stark “colored” signs of segregated public facilities and somber black children picking cotton.
Mr. Stryker’s group of photographers “introduced Americans to America” and an entire generation to “the reality of its own time and place in history,” Mr. Stryker says in an interview heard on the program, which is narrated by Julian Bond, chairman of the N.A.A.C.P.
“I wanted to introduce a new generation to some of these photographs and the amazing stories that went with them,” said Jeanine Isabel Butler, who wrote and directed the film and produced it with her husband, Alastair Reilly, and her sister, Catherine Lynn Butler, in association with South Carolina ETV. Jeanine Isabel Butler is a writer and producer of documentary and educational films for PBS, the Discovery Channel and the National Geographic Channel among others.
Ms. Butler said that she was captivated by the idea of how a small-agency bureaucrat like Mr. Stryker, who kept a tight rein on his photographers and constantly wrangled more money for his work, managed to remain idealistic. Her team began working on the film in 2000, she said, and scored a coup along the way by interviewing Mr. Parks, one of the country’s most celebrated photographers, who died in 2006 at 93.
Arthur Rothstein’s “Fleeing a Dust Storm” is featured in “Documenting the Face of America,” Monday on most PBS stations.CreditLibrary of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
“I feel like some of the issues we were facing then continue to be issues we as a society face,” Ms. Butler said. “There are still racial and class differences that can inspire a whole new generation of filmmakers, artists and photographers to look and begin to capture. But it’ll never be a big government project again.”
F. Jack Hurley, professor emeritus of history at the University of Memphis and author of a book on Mr. Stryker, who died in 1975, said in an interview that “Documenting the Face of America” helped put a few dozen widely reproduced Depression-era photographs into a broader context. Mr. Hurley, who appears throughout the documentary, said it also showed that the photographs, now celebrated, were once denounced in some quarters as the Roosevelt administration’s political propaganda, meant to win favor for some of his New Deal initiatives.
“What we think of as social documentary, it starts here,” Mr. Hurley said in an interview. “Stryker started out showing rural poverty to well-off urban people but broadened the file to include the middle-class and even farmers faring well.” Mr. Stryker gave questions to the photographers to serve as guidelines for their work, Mr. Hurley said: What do people in small-town Texas do on a Saturday afternoon? How do people in Mississippi use their porches?
“You wind up with a nicely balanced portrait of America in the ’30s,” he said.
Mr. Stryker, heard on screen in a 1975 audio interview with Mr. Hurley, says he quickly realized that farmers in every area of the country were suffering. “The picture began to be the thing of my life,” he says. “The photograph was the way to reach the people. Somehow, some way, I wanted life in the pictures.”
“Documenting the Face of America” includes excerpts from Mr. Stryker’s letters and interview transcripts, and excerpts from the diaries and shooting scripts belonging to him and the photographers. It is chock-full of the most famous photographs of Ms. Lange and Mr. Rothstein, as well as Mr. Parks and Mr. Evans, Jack Delano, Russell Lee, Marion Post Wolcott, Ben Shahn and others.
Mr. Stryker, a World War I veteran and assistant professor of economics at Columbia University, went to work for the federal government in the summer of 1935, when the country was in the grip of the Great Depression. He directed the historical unit of the Resettlement Administration (later the Farm Security Administration). In the ’40s his photography unit was assigned to the Office of War Information, or O.W.I.
The initial assignment of the historical unit was to use photographs to try to persuade Congress that thousands of dispossessed farm families were in desperate need of government assistance.
Mr. Stryker had grown up on small dirt farm outside Montrose, Colo., and his father was “a prairie populist,” Mr. Hurley says in the film.
“Roy’s patriotism included the right to question the way things were done,” Mr. Hurley says in an on-camera interview. “And certainly by the 1930s he was very angry about the situation that poor farmers found themselves in and he really wanted to do something about it.”
Mr. Parks — whose work for Mr. Stryker produced “American Gothic,” the image of a black government cleaning woman standing in front of an American flag, a broom in one hand and a mop by her other side — talks about his first meeting with his boss soon after he arrived.
Mr. Stryker gave Mr. Parks an unusual assignment: leave the Farm Security Administration office at 14th Street and Independence Avenue and get lunch across the street. Then go across the street to a theater. There, in the heart of the capital, Mr. Parks found the “Whites Only” signs that barred his admission.
Mr. Parks, in an on-screen interview, recalls reporting his experiences to Mr. Stryker on his return to the office. “I said, ‘I think you know how it went.’ He says: ‘Yeah, I know how it went. Well, what are you going to do about it?’ I said: ‘I don’t know. What do I do about it?’ He said, ‘Well, what did you bring that camera down here for?’ ”
Although Mr. Stryker kept his photographers together through various political challenges, World War II changed everything, the film shows. His unit was moved to the Office of War Information, and he lost control of it. His photographers were asked to produce propaganda, like photographs that showed the supposedly fair treatment of the Japanese-Americans interned in wartime camps. But before resigning in 1943 Mr. Stryker appealed directly to the White House to keep the thousands of photographs together at the Library of Congress, where most remain.