oen-anderson I am sort of split both ways about this film. On the one hand, I agree with what a lot of folks have said about it--it certainly doesn't present a picture of the "whole" South, in any way, or even much of the South, at that. I was born in rural Virginia and grew up in Austin, TX., and I'm not much like most of the folks in this film, being from a large city with a culture very different from the corners of the Deep South this film was looking at. What's more, I'm currently finishing up my college education in Massachusetts, and when people up here ask me where I'm from and I tell them I'm from Texas, it does irk me when sometimes they give me weird looks and make comments like their whole picture of anything south of the Mason-Dixon line is just like this movie and it gives them the willies to have someone like that in the car with them or whatever (though even if it was, I don't see why that should--it's not like I or the folks in this film are gonna pull a pistol on them or something).That said, I think criticizing the film on those grounds misses its intent. It's clearly not a documentary in the same way that, say, a nature special is--the point is to focus on a very specific aspect of the South that the people involved in the film consider important and to capture it aesthetically, rather than make a "true-to-life" (whatever that means) depiction of the South as a whole. The film broadcasts that every second. Complaining about certain parts of it being "staged" or the characters in the film seeming hand-picked sounds silly to me--I mean, of course they are. This ain't a fly-on-the-wall film and it isn't trying to be; it's not trying to hoodwink anyone or pull the wool over the eyes of foreigners to sell records or whatever. I think it would be equally silly to view this movie and get the impression that it was trying to be an "objective" documentary, and if anyone sees this film and views it that way, I'm gonna say that's their fault for being thick and not the movie's for trying to "trick" them.I do think it's understandable to see this and have sort of a knee-jerk reaction lumping it in with all the other films and books and articles and advertisements and whatever that do portray the South in a very limited, stereotyped light and do so mainly to cash in on a false conception a lot of folks have and make a quick buck. They are certainly legion and irksome. However, not only do they try a lot harder to fool people, but they--like this film--are able to succeed based on the fact that what they are trying to portray does really exist, in a sense, just not in nearly as distilled a fashion. I've spent plenty of time in small towns, out in the woods, in the desert, the middle of nowhere, wherever, and though Texas is pretty different from Florida or Louisiana, the sort of folks and the kinds of happenings portrayed in this film are definitely around, and it can be a real joy to find people willing to spin a yarn or talk with you about religion or play music--or just shoot the breeze and relax or whatever. For some people--Jim White and a lot of the other musicians in the film, it seems, for instance--certain types of those sorts of experiences, in this case frequently the darkly or strikingly religious ones, are the heart of the South. They see them as the essence of the region, it's a distillation of what makes it important to them, and they want to capture it--in song, or film, or what have you. Doing that requires excluding a lot of other stuff about it that doesn't come as close to the core for them. Other people have very different ideas about what the essence of the South is, and that's fine, it makes sense; it's a huge and very multi-faceted area, but that doesn't make the views of those people illegitimate. In as much as this film is an attempt to capture that particular spirit, I think it's an emphatic success. It's sublime and haunting, the stories are great, and the music is wonderful. Does it show the whole, resounding South, in all its glory? Absolutely not--it has wrung a very specific type of dark beauty out of the region like a damp cloth. Woe betide anyone who views this film and thinks it's the total picture, for sure (although how any film could ever possibly hope to do that, I don't know--after all, just because it doesn't show your own experience of the South doesn't mean it misses the point, given that we've all acknowledged the South is vast), but it's hard to imagine that such a person would be able to tell the difference between the evening news and an action movie either. If you're better than that--and I think you are--you may enjoy this film.

arremmbooker We need more negative comments on this film. Sadly it is a strong expression and will continue to influence people, especially youngsters. But we should expose its "alt. country" aesthetic for the exploitative hubris it pretends not to be.If you make it through this film without laughing out loud at Jim White's nonsense, you should watch it again and really use your brain."I decided I'm going to come back to the South and become a Southerner. As best I can. I will never be a Southerner. I will be this imitation of a Southerner. But in a way, I feel like that brings me closer to God, because I've chosen--it's almost like a form of divinity. I've chosen my divinity rather than my divinity choosing me." Oh yeah? You're like this guy I know who decided he's going to go back to L.A. and become a gangster. He'll never be a gangster. He'll be this imitation of a gangster. But in a way, he feels like that brings him closer to reality, because he's chosen . . . it's like a new form of authenticity. He's chosen his authenticity rather than his authenticity choosing him. Last I heard he'd started an "alt. hip-hop" group no one cares about."You don't see the south ... on the interstate. You go 5 or 10 miles off the interstate and you get the South as it was 50 years ago or a 100 years ago. And you can't do that in many places." SFWEJ is ostensibly a film about "Southern" culture, but its composition--its contrived southern Gothic aesthetic--tells us much more about contemporary American cultural stagnation, evidenced in such desperate identity-quests as White's. It's a shame that he inscribes that identity onto people he doesn't know and I daresay would never ACTUALLY hang out with, just so he can legitimate the ersatz prewar Southern image he's constructed for himself. He's like, what, 40? And he acts like a verbally gifted high-school kid who's still finding himself. He naively makes up stories about people he may not have really known, and inserts himself in between scenes of "authentic" (non-actor) Southerners to remind us that he and they are one and the same (as if such gestures could conceal his position of literary and social power over his subject-cum-object).By focusing only on the most remote and eccentric locales and people, White, the filmmakers, and the other musicians are only furthering irrelevant Southern stereotypes--keeping the fictional literary South alive so the mediocre, media-addled Anglo-Americans for whom it was constructed more than 100 years ago can go on dreaming their jaded, irrelevant dreams--and buying albums and concert tickets. This aesthetic object, the "South," contains no meaningful or useful information. It has two purposes: to make money, and to get our collective rocks off on an Other. No one disputes that Pentecostal gatherings are unusual, even Pentecostals—unless they are too young or sheltered to know that there are other people in the world besides Pentecostals. But because they are unusual and there are quite a few of them in "the South" (not to mention in the more Southern nations of the Caribbean and elsewhere all over the planet) they supposedly embody the aesthetic paradox of hell/heaven, bliss/torment, that characterize "the South"'s "atmosphere." Great job, guys. I've never encountered that before. It's not like Faulkner and O'Connor used poetic metaphors a million years ago to justify the ignorance, poverty, and needless suffering they perceived around them. But when ignorance, poverty and needless suffering are the lived reality rather than a marketing tool I have a hard time caring whether there's "beauty in it." The film doesn't come clean; it doesn't admit that it's primarily a promotion for the handful of alt. country musicians we see trying to blend in with the extras (read: human props). Everything about these pretentious protagonists betrays their conceit and their second-hand rip-off of the '60s folk revival (which was itself an ersatz identity-crisis that had no bearing on the lives of most real people living in the South). How derivative can you get? The way Johansen plays Geechie Wiley's "Last Kind Word" shows me nothing about the "South." It only shows me he has probably seen Crumb, the documentary about R. Crumb, whence most anyone's knowledge of that recording comes. Admit it.The cinematography is beautiful, but the pretense to ethnography (or whatever you'd call it) is a shameful context for such talent. The scene with Melissa Swingle playing "Amazing Grace" on the saw is gorgeous, but is only palatable as a stand-alone music video; I could do without her oh-so-"Southern" anecdote. Some of the other musicians are talented and seem sincerely inspired. White seems like a nice guy, a dedicated artist and a hard worker. But they've opened an undead can of worms. No doubt many of my fellow Arkansans have seen this film. To what degree it inspires the alt. country scene in this region I don't know, but it can potentially warp lots of minds and that is depressing.Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus is perfect proof that the neo-Gothic, alt. country "Southern" aesthetic is a "postmodern" (in Fredric Jameson's sense) symptom of America's lack of historical sense. Don't buy into the pseudo-populist fantasy that the South hasn't sold out, that urban sprawl is not the "real" South, that if you rambled aimlessly in this vaguely-defined region you would find the philosopher's stone Jim White wants to be there. It's all mythology, and unoriginal mythology at that. This film masquerades as a rediscovery or celebration of something the "South" has kept which the rest of America has lost, but if you were to ask White exactly what that is, he couldn't give you a straight answer. If he could, there would be no reason to make this film and the poet/guru facade he cultivates in order to make his living would crumble.

Sibella I am a huge fan of Jim White the musician, and I didn't make it through more than 23 minutes of this film. Now maybe things changed later; I'll grant that. Right at the beginning of the film, White procures a concrete statue of Jesus. He and some others remove it from where it lies in state along the entire length of the inside of a car trunk. But when it goes into the trunk of his seemingly equally large car, it protrudes beyond the back of the car, as if it doesn't fit--so we can see White's burden. It seems a telling incident: the heavy-handed symbolism and artsy contrivance stick out from White's cinematic vehicle like...well, You Know Who.By the time I stopped, nearly all of the people I'd seen talking were No Depression- magazine-darling musicians and other people who might have used the film toward an MFA. Not that there's anything wrong with the highly qualified and sometimes actually Southern talent here. (I especially enjoyed Harry Crews' storytelling.) But the film purports to be a sort of documentary road trip, exploring Southern spiritual culture, and instead was on its way to becoming--I repeat, I quit a third of the way in--a sometimes evocatively pretty, sometimes maddeningly awkward music video.Why drive around the Louisiana bayous if the people you "find" playing banjos and singing spirituals are, like you, likely to have tour schedules on MySpace?I emphasize: Jim White is a musical genius, and this film should not dissuade anyone from checking out his work or that of artists like Crews, the Handsome Family, etc. It's just an unfortunate misstep as a movie.

b-zondag As a 'stranger' to the American culture, I was really impressed by this docu-movie. It gives me a look in the American South. Of course one can not give a complete portrait of something. There always a need for some subjectivity. I understand there a million other sides of the American South. For example, if you make a movie about Holland, surely you'll see mills and klompen. This is not representative for modern-day Holland, but it's a part of our culture, our history. I think the same applies to this movie. Apart from this, the movie is intertwining music, art and storytelling. This is fantastic!