Jim White, maker of the albums Wrong-Eyed Jesus and No Such Place, is the tourguide in the movie Searching For The Wrong-Eyed Jesus. An 85-minute documentary by Andrew Douglas, structured like a road movie.

In La Dolce Vita a statue of Christ is transported over Rome hanging from a helicopter. In Searching For The Wrong-Eyed Jesus a sculpture of Jesus sticks out of the trunk of Jim White's battered old car as he is searching for the soul of the American South where Jesus is never far away.

The footage of 16 Horsepower (the band playing an acoustic version Poor Mouth in an old bible revival tent) did not make the final cut of the movie that is being shown on the big screen. But it is on the DVD. David Eugene Edwards is included in the theatrical release playing solo versions of Wayfaring Stranger and Phyllis Ann.

Searching For The Wrong-Eyed Jesus premiered at the IDFA festival (International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam) in November 2003. In The Netherlands the movie was screened from 26 February 2004 onwards in cinemas participating in the Docuzone programme. The movie opened in the UK on 28 June 2004 and was broadcast by BBC 4 on 9 July 2004 and BBC 2 on 23 January 2006. Dutch TV station VPRO showed the movie on 4 December 2005. The documentary has been shown on various film festivals. It was released on DVD in the UK on 30 January 2006 by Plexi and stateside in March 2006 by Image Entertainment. The soundtrack came out on Luaka Bop in 2005.

When photographer and filmmaker Andrew Douglas got the Jim White album 'Wrong-eyed Jesus', or to give it its full title, 'The Mysterious Tale Of How I Shouted Wrong-Eyed Jesus!' he was both impressed and intrigued by it. And that's why, when he decided to make a film about the American South, he asked Jim White to be his tour guide.

In one of the first scenes, after White has decided that a battered 1970 Chevy is the most appropriate car for a road trip through the South, White is about to buy a statue of Jesus. The seller must have thought "hey, if this guy shows up here with a camera crew he must have a lot of cash to spend", because his asking price is $600. "60" White replies instantly, in deadpan fashion. "OK, 65", the seller agrees, after another nano-second. A great piece of haggling, that's for sure. But what was the point of this acquisition? Well, riding around in a car with a statue sticking out of the trunk is quite photogenic. And Douglas, with a background in music videos and TV commercials, sure does have an eye for a good frame.

One of the first people White meets, on a dirt road in the woods, is Georgia-born writer Harry Crews who has a very amusing tale about the Sears Roebuck mail-order catalogue. He couldn't relate to the people in the catalogue at all, because they all had perfect, or should we say intact, bodies. He didn't know anybody who still had all of his fingers or hadn't lost an eye. At home they started making up stories about the people in the catalogue until everybody was related to each other and arguing. Like in their world. Storytelling is a returning theme in the movie. Every Southerner seems to have the gift of gab and can tell you the most beautiful or the saddest story you have ever heard in your life. So we are told. And most of these stories naturally deal with death; family members seem to cross the Styx continually. Other favourite, and sometimes related, topics are drugs and crime. A not so favourite topic is keeping house. Nobody can be bothered to tidy his or her room, so it appears. :-)

Much of the movie takes place in Louisiana, perhaps because the swamps look great, and in Florida, White's home state. And also home to the truck stop for Jesus (where Crews turns up later quoting Goethe). Not only is Jesus moved around in the trunk, though in some shots it seems as if the statue is no longer in the trunk (damn that continuity :-). He is omnipresent. Not only in the Pentecostal churches, where in White's words you have to leave your mind at the door as you enter and walk in with your heart, with people whirling like dervishes (non-Muslim dervishes naturally :-) or speaking in tongues, all inspired by the holy spirit. But nearly everybody seems to work for a gospel radio station or is "jamming for Jesus" in one way or another. Even in the juke joints, Jesus is only one day away. On Saturday night you do everything God has forbidden and on Sunday morning you go to church, repent, ask God to forgive you and everything is all right again. They almost sound like Catholics. :-)

Musicians pop up on various, sometimes unlikely, locations. The most surreal setting is that of the Handsome Family playing on the porch of a house that is completely surrounded by water, with the water almost flooding the porch. Yet they stand there playing with mikes and amps.

Besides The Handsome Family, David Johansen (formerly of the New York Dolls) and David Eugene Edwards make appearances. All not Southerners if we're not mistaken. 16 Horsepower is one of the three acts mentioned on the film poster, in The Netherlands anyway, but the band actually didn't make the cut. David Eugene Edwards did. First we hear him singing a snippet of Wayfaring Stranger as he takes his banjo for a walk in the backwoods. In another scene he's sitting on a tree trunk when a fresh young kid with a brand new bike (are the woods an ideal place to cycle? :-) asks him if many people still play this music. Yes, it is still played in some places, Edwards answers. Then the kid asks what the symbols on the banjo are. A horseshoe and a cross. The latter because the music is played for God, says Edwards. When he is asked if he can play another tune, Edwards looks meditative for a while and then starts playing Phyllis Ann/Ruth (or Cottonmouth according to the credits). There's a fade-out after about a minute.

A Southern musician who emerges several times is Johnny Dowd. And boy, his singing is so out of tune continually it becomes hysterical. And he doesn't manage to pick up the female bartender he's trying to chat up. It certainly isn't his movie :-) Local musicians show their skills too. Three sisters singing Knoxville Girl, an old banjo player singing Rye Whiskey ("If the ocean was full of whiskey and if I was a duck", a great way to start a verse). Two songs also covered by Nick Cave, but that must be a coincidence.

We travel as far north as Kentucky and Virginia. And generally speaking the people along the way are treated with respect. But there is one scene where a woman with a seriously disfigured face is shown in close-up for seemingly no other reason then that it makes for a nice picture. If feels like she is being displayed in a freak show. David Lynch treated the elephant man with great respect in the movie with that title. Here Douglas shows the elephant woman no respect, but exploits her, which we found rather tasteless.

We learn a lot from White. For instance that the tape (the one favoured by roadies) on Alabama cars to cover rust holes is called Alabama Chrome. And sometimes he dispenses pearls of wisdom in his own laid-back way. For instance that sometimes you have to look away to see how things really are. "If you look directly at something it is inapprehensible." Or why his cat wants to attack a chicken on TV when it has never ever seen a chicken in its life. Because it is in its blood. Like certain things are in the blood of Southerners. "The blood rules them, they don't rule the blood". At the end of the movie, when White is supposed to return the car he loaned he leaves the statue on the side of the road and drives off. And he picked the right time to return home, because the movie threatened to start repeating itsself. And that danger was avoided by leaving Jesus there like an abondonded hithchiker.

'Searching For The Wrong-Eyed Jesus' is an entertaining movie. But at times the movie indulges in over-romanticising the South, making it an even more Mythical place. And it's a very selective view of the South. For instance, the statue-seller was, to use the political correct term, an African American. And he is the only one, or one of a very small number of African Americans we get to see in this movie. Douglas' South is segregated and white. Even in prison. All the inmates are Caucasian. What are the chances of that, statistically speaking? Or are we being politically incorrect now? :-)

The movie is a bit one-dimensional. Which isn't meant as a value judgement but as a neutral observation. 'Searching For The Wrong-Eyed Jesus' is an outsider's outlook by an outsider who only shows us his romantic view of the South. Notwithstanding that, for the most time the film makes you feel like driving an old Chevy across the former Confederate States yourself. But without that statue sticking out of the boot. :->

by TYFC

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Searching For The Wrong-Eyed Jesus
DIRECTED BY Andrew Douglas
STARRING: Jim White, Johnny Dowd, The Handsome Family
Opens June 28, Cert 12A, 85 min.

Showing for a limited time at London's National Film Theatre prior to an airing on television this is film-maker Andrew Douglas' road trip through America's Deep South, inspired by Jim White's creepy-strange 1997 debut, The Mysterious Tale Of How I Shouted Wrong-Eyed Jesus.

"If there's no moderation," Jim White told Uncut recently, "the truth is easier to apprehend. Only it's wearing a Halloween costume. It's not the friendly face of truth. It's kinda scary."

Trawling the truck stops, coal mines, prisons, "cut'n'shoot" bars and Pentecostal churches in a beat-up 1970 Chevy (with a 6 ft effigy of Christ jammed in the trunk), White himself acts as tour guide in this riveting film.

And what does White find? A populace driven by extremes, dirt-poor white folk caught between Jesus and Hell with nothing in between. With backwater trailer parks dotting the horizon like shanty tombstones, a spiritual desperation emerges, born of isolation, where even grief is something to hold on to. It reminds you you're still alive. At Concordia Correctional Facility, Louisiana, inmates explain simply that "doing bad is exciting." Outside, a gun-toting Hell's Angel wannabe unloads at a "Stop" sign. For him, being bad beats being nothing. White uncovers cyclical patterns of behaviour - on every smalltown fringe lurk artists, criminals and religious fanatics, hollow-eyed souls for whom sin is a time-honoured ritual.

Along the way, Johnny Dowd, The Handsome Family, David Eugene Edwards, David Johansen and knotty old-time banjoist Lee Sexton provide musical interludes in barber shops, houseboats and midnight parking lots (the soundtrack's a killer obviously).

Despite reinforcing the view of the American South as a grisly car-smash of humanity, full of Deliverance hicks and Rod Steiger cops, White's take is ultimately sympathetic. It's a world free from sophisticated distraction, forced to stare down the truth. Communities ruled by what Flannery O'Connor called "wise blood."

Most tellingly, writer Harry Crews explains that southern culture finds its identity in deep traditions of storytelling. It's their way of righting an imperfect world. Genuinely compelling.

4 stars (out of 5)

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You need the right car to drive through the American south, says Jim White. "You can't show up in some Land Rover or some Lexus or something, expect poor folks to talk to you, tell you about what's in their heart." For White, the right car is his friend Jimmy Tuck's 1970s Chevvy: plenty of rust spots, but also a good, big engine on it.

It's hard to say what kind of film Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus (BBC4) is. It's a travelogue, a music documentary, an anthropological study of poor white America. Whatever, it's a beautiful film. White, the alt.country singer - and a southerner himself - is the guide, the narrator and often the accompanist.

It's a funny old place, the south. Full of swamps and forests, piles of old buses, wonky faced people with bad teeth and bad hair, and thousands of pool tables. Jesus is everywhere; so is fear of the devil. You're either with Jesus or against him - there's no middle ground. Most people are with him.

White stops in diners and truck stops, bars, hair salons and churches. There are plenty of stars in this film: Bubba Drane, who rides around on his Harley with his red bandanna and his pistol, shooting at road signs; the writer Harry Crews with his head full of stories; and the Rev Gary Howington who used to be a bad boy but then found Jesus and now whips his pentecostal congregation into a frenzy and has them all speaking in tongues. Some of the sanest people are the guys in the Concordia Parish Correctional Facility.

Fellow musicians pop up all along the way. Johnny Dowd happens to be strumming away in a wrecker's yard by the road, the Handsome Family play a sad song from the porch of a wooden shack that floats on a Louisiana bayou, David Eugene Edwards from 16 Horsepower strolls through a creepy wood with his banjo, and David Johansen plays a beautiful song sitting on the bed of a motel room.

It's hard to find the spirit of the place, White concludes. "You wanna know the secrets of the south, you gotta get it in your blood. And you ain't going to get a transfusion from the blood bank for it."

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Interview with Jim White
from UK TV station BBC, 22 June 2004

Jim White has been a professional surfer, model and New York cabbie. His first album, Wrong-Eyed Jesus, was released in 1997. His latest record, Drill A Hole... was released in June.

BBC Four: How did you react when you heard that an English guy wanted to make a film about you?
Jim White: I thought there were people better suited than me to be a tour guide to the underbelly of the South, like Johnny Dowd. But they liked the fact that I wasn't born there and don't have eight generations of Southern blood in me. As an outsider I can convey the oddness of the South yet I'm still familiar with the intricacies of it.

BBC Four: Johnny Dowd is from the South, but it's interesting that other musicians in the film, like 16 Horsepower and The Handsome Family, aren't...
JW: No, but they are all influenced by Southern culture, Southern religious culture even - either the rejection of religion or the acceptance of it. David Eugene Edwards [16 Horsepower] is a devoutly religious person. Rennie Sparks from The Handsome Family is fascinated by the carnality of Southern religion or the "bloodthirstiness" as she calls it. So I think that the choices made sense. If they'd got Southern bands or some singer from Texas like Joe Ely then it wouldn't have transcended anything. It would only show the cause, it wouldn't show the effect. In far-away places people are influenced by Southern storytelling and music. That's really the point. Its influences on culture in the English-speaking world are fairly profound and yet nobody's ever really referred to that.

BBC Four: Religion is obviously such a major part of that culture, I almost said a suffocating part...
JW: Suffocating is fine. When you're poor and there is no opportunity for pleasure in this life, you have to invent something to keep you going. If the ship never comes in then you invent the ship. The ship that they've invented there is Jesus and the Second Coming of Christ - The Rapture as they call it. There's a lot of very normal people in middle-class jobs who sincerely believe that in a couple of weeks or couple of months, they're going to get yanked out of their car and watch the earth disappear below them like a little speck of dust, and they are going to sing praises in a city covered in jewels and gold. For a person who lives in London that must seem like a mentally-ill vision, but it's considered quite normal in the South.

BBC Four: Have you found your own beliefs mixing with that very distinctive Southern religious culture?
JW: They are coloured by it. I was indoctrinated into the church at the age of about eight when I went to what I thought was a summer camp. In fact it was a church indoctrination camp. They don't put you on a hay ride or take you to the swimming hall. They preach Jesus to you for an hour and then again three times a day. It's insidious.

At a certain point going to church became the only way I could see to survive. I was an oddball and the oddballs fell into two categories - those oddballs that were getting saved and the oddballs that were strung out on heroin and starting to shoot people.

I went in the direction of the criminal for long enough to see that I didn't fit in there and was going to come to a bad end. I have no self-control. If I'd have taken one hit of heroin I'd have been dead because I wouldn't have been able to stop. So I went to church. I figured that excess in search of God can't be that bad of a thing. But it's its own drug.

By viewing the world through the church, intensely, passionately, with spirit and mind, I see the world through a pair of what I call Jesus glasses. If I take the Jesus glasses off, I'm blind. The difference between me and the other people in the South is real simple: with every step that I take and every word that I utter there's a little subtitle which says, "Don't take it too seriously because I'm wearing Jesus glasses". I can't take them off. I can't not see the world through that context, but I can remind myself that it's a tainted context of the world.

BBC Four: William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor are both mentioned in the film. Are there any other Southern cultural figures you tend to go back to?
JW: I just enjoy standing around against a truck talking to regular people who know how to tell a story well and know their way around exotic phraseology. I go to the flea market every weekend. It's a cornucopia of fascinating people. If you get to know them then you'll hear all sorts of stories. One tells you how he was an ordained preacher but he backslid and spent 10 years in prison. Then you see the next guy and he's got tears tattooed under his eye. When you ask him what those are he says that each one is for someone he killed in prison. If you just sit and listen to the richness of the culture, you don't have to go and look in literature.

BBC Four: How did you plan where you travelled in the film?
JW: It was based on a circle of locations: the honky-tonk, the farm, the church and the prison. Each one informs the other and we just planned to let this circle of ideas tell us what we don't know right now. They had some cities in mind and I had some cities in mind. They wanted to go to Ferriday, Louisiana, because Jerry Lee Lewis was born there. People there are aware of the outside world and yet at the same time it's a tiny little town in rural Louisiana.

I wanted them to go to the Jesus is Lord Catfish Restaurant and Truck Stop. The whole place was painted with a scene depicting The Rapture - pictures of planes crashing and souls flying up in the air, but sadly, two weeks before we went there they painted it all white. You can't imagine how beautiful it was. Andrew [Douglas - director] called me on the phone crying. That was going to be the first place we shot. It was all gone; they'd saved one little part of the wall which you see in the film.

I think that tells a little story about the good that the film is doing. It's documenting something that is going to get painted white. Pretty soon, the South that's in the film is going to be harder and harder to find.

BBC Four: If someone watched the film and became inspired to make a trip to South, where would you recommend that they go?
JW: Well, they need to fly to Jacksonville, Florida and call Tyler Greenwell on the phone - 1-800-752-1778. Tyler is one of my best friends. A lot of what I know about the underbelly of the South, I know from Tyler. He's always at the place where all the craziest people are, so he's got access to all these strange individuals. They can stay at Tyler's house. That's what he's like - he's got mattresses leaning up against the walls of his house. He runs a gambling boat in Jacksonville called La Cruise.

From Jacksonville, you should just get on any side road and go. Don't go to the malls, don't go to the strip malls, don't go to the Cracker Barrel. Go to the back roads and eat at the places that look like you'll get sick at and ask everyone to tell you a story. Some of them are going to want to fight. But you don't ever learn anything by playing it safe. I'd go in the winter, though, because in the summer people don't have a lot of energy because it's so damn hot.

BBC Four: Finally, are you going to grow your hair back?
JW: No. I wanted to cut it for years but my ex-wife said she needed to be with a man that looked like Jesus. It's that simple. I didn't want to have any more arguments than we were already having so as soon as we split up I cut it off. I'm too old to mess with floppy hair, particularly in the South when in the summertime it's just a blanket of misery. It's like wearing a wet wig on your head every night. So my hair is going to stay like this. It's much more comfortable.

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Interview with Andrew Douglas
from UK TV station BBC, 17 June 2004

Andrew Douglas started his career as a professional photographer in the music and publishing industries. Since 1991 he has made commercials for clients including Adidas, Nike and Microsoft. Searching For the Wrong-Eyed Jesus is his first film.

BBC Four: How does an Englishman end up travelling around the South with Jim White?
Andrew Douglas: A friend gave me Jim's record, The Wrong-Eyed Jesus, for Christmas. In the sleeve, rather than the lyrics, there's a story he'd written. It was fascinating. The music was the starting point, it was so cinematic, but this story was really the motivation. So I called Jim and went down to visit him in Pensacola in North Florida where he lives. The plan was to develop a feature film script - fiction. But as we started to see Jim White's strange world I began to realise that what was in Jim's songs wasn't made up - it was reportage.

I began to think about a very different kind of film in which we see the world that generated that kind of music - increasingly Christ-haunted, with a church on every street corner. On a Saturday night you decide whether to go to the bar, then on Sunday you go and seek redemption in the church. So the project moved away from a fiction project into a documentary project.

BBC Four: Had you been to the South before?
AD: No. By the time I'd finished the film I'd been there four times, looking at different types of South. The South of that film is very much a South of our own design. It's a South defined by musicians and storytellers we liked, and by the Bible Belt. We didn't care about Texas, we didn't go to Miami. Somebody at the Tribeca Festival in New York told me, "That's not an accurate portrait of the South" and I said, "No, of course it isn't. I wasn't interested in golfers".

BBC Four: There's also no mention of black people or the Civil War...
AD: In my defence, I don't think it's a film that sets itself up to be an exhaustive portrait of the South. From that first paragraph onwards it sets out what it's going to do: it's going to explore a rather limited world. It's a film with a point of view and included in that point of view was that I didn't want the film to deal with the Civil War, and the segregation story is a whole other film. This is very much a film about the poor white South because I felt that was an under-explored subject.

BBC Four: How did you choose the locations?
AD: Even though we did travel to other places, we shot a lot in the one town - Ferriday, Louisiana - that gave us the so-called Stations of the Cross: the jailhouse, the honky-tonk, the church. A Southern town like Ferriday is very much the paradigm of the white South. They're all pretty much cookie cutter after that - some have snakes, some don't.

BBC Four: It's a documentary but it certainly doesn't feel like a traditional documentary. Were there any precedents that you had in mind while making it?
AD: Not really. Because I don't have a strict journalistic background it was not an activist journalistic subject. My intention wasn't to expose the Third World of Bush's America. But it kind of does - it shows exactly his constituency and it starts to illuminate his foreign policy, because when people in the South talk about The Rapture that is Bush's foreign policy.

It differs from most documentaries in that it started as a series of notions about exploring the music and storytelling in a place that had its own conflicts. Documentaries are usually polemics. This didn't really have that as its basis and I think that made it much more of a searching film. We had all these notions we wanted to explore but we didn't force ourselves to be disciplined in the way we explored them. It's a documentary in the sense that it's live speech, live music and live testimonial - it's people saying their own words. But it's people saying their own words very much in a context which was in pursuit of ideas.

BBC Four: It's also unusual in that a lot of what's in it, especially the music, is so obviously staged...
AD: I wanted a lot of music because the music we chose very much explored a storytelling tradition. In my mind, with Jim White, Johnny Dowd and the writer Harry Crews, I wanted them to be all the same kind of testimony. I felt I had to find a solution for the music that wasn't like a pop video. I wanted the people to sing to me the same way they might talk to me or I might interview them. So that was the guiding principle - how to make a song compelling in the world of MTV that was still very much live like an interview. Then if something presented itself on the day, like the clear construction of the girl singing in the beauty parlour, I wasn't scared of them.

BBC Four: How did you end up filming in the jail?
AD: We asked the mayor if it was possible. They just let us in and asked if we wanted a black cell or a white cell. It's a story about the poor white South so we took a white cell - it was already segregated. I introduced myself and the crew, and as much as I could I introduced the subject matter of the film. We wanted to know what's so small about the small town that landed them in there. Anybody who wanted to talk just talked.

Some of the prisoners were very, very articulate. There's one man who says very poignantly, "I don't know what happened, when you're a kid you just kind of dive in. When you get older you can't seem to go in the water so well". He's not really talking about jail; he's talking about life. It has a great kind of beauty and sadness to it, I think. Another guy really nails the main themes of the film, saying, "When you're young, you're either in the bars or you're in the church. There's no middle ground".

The interesting thing is that here are people who are poor, under-privileged and often ill-educated people who because they live in a culture that is so dense and saturated with Jesus, redemption and sin, have a kind of articulacy that the equivalent people back in England wouldn't have because they don't think about the world in such a consequential way. That's what makes a culture that on the surface looks rough and thin and under-privileged and bigoted, increasingly look rich and dense and textured to us. You could equally go to a Muslim nation in the Middle East and say that this addition of religion to a culture at such a consequential level makes for quite a substantial, rich, conflicted culture. All we do back home in our secular world is fight about football.

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