Saturday AUGUST 19
1:45 PM THEATER ONE
The Tailenders
Adele Horne
Documentary Video 72:00 2006 Chicago Premiere
Filmed in the Solomon Islands, Mexico, India, and the United States,
THE TAILENDERS explores the connections between missionary activity and
global capitalism. THE TAILENDERS examines a missionary organization¹s use of
ultra-low-tech audio devices to evangelize indigenous communities
facing crises caused by global economic forces.
Joy Ridderhoff founded Gospel Recordings in 1939 in Los Angeles. She
remembered how crowds had gathered around gramophones in the Honduran
villages where she had worked as a missionary, and decided that rather
than compete with this medium; she would use it to preach. The organization
that she founded has now produced audio recordings of Bible stories in over
5,000 languages, and aims to record in every language on earth. They
distribute these recordings along with hand-wind players in regions with limited
access to electricity and media. The Bible stories played by the missionaries
are sometimes the first encounter community members have had with recorded
sound, and, even more frequently, the first time they have heard their
own language recorded. Gospel Recordings calls their target audience "the
Tailenders" because they are the last to be reached by global
evangelism.
The missionaries target communities in crisis because they have found
that displaced and desperate people are especially receptive to the
evangelical recordings. When uprooted from one's home, as in the case of Mexican
migrant workers, the sound of one's own language is a comfort. And the audio
players are appealing media gadgets. Audiences who might not otherwise be
interested in the missionaries' message will listen to the recordings. THE
TAILENDERS focuses on how the media objects and messages introduced by the
missionaries play a role in larger socioeconomic transformations, such as the move
away from subsistence economies toward cash economies based on agricultural
and industrial labor.
The film raises questions about how people who receive the recordings
understand them. Gospel Recording¹s project is premised on a belief in
the transparency of language to transmit a divinely inspired message. But
because the missionaries don't speak the languages, they must enlist
bilingual native speakers as translators. There is ample opportunity
for mistakes, selectivity, and resistance in the translation. The film
explores how meaning changes as it crosses language and culture. Adele Horne