Prophets and Propaganda, or, If Faces Tire You, What Will Movies Do?
Art & Trash, episode 45
Prophets and Propaganda, or, If Faces Tire You, What Will Movies Do?
Stephen Broomer, December 6, 2024
Following a near-death experience, Nashville exploitation filmmaker Ron Ormond undertook a series of filmed sermons in collaboration with the evangelical Baptist preacher Estus Pirkle. These collaborations ranged from portraits of heaven and hell to a dire warning of the threat of Communism to America's Christians - a warning realized in such a fashion as to become an enduring curio. From Ormond and Pirkle's collaborations, amateur drama, hysterical fantasy, and manipulative rhetoric resonates far beyond the tent-stakes of the revivalist ministry, in the Church of Camp, from which the preacher’s red-baiting, fear mongering narration and the filmmaker’s exploitation roots could inspire mocking laughter.
In this video essay, Stephen Broomer addresses their collaborations in the context of montage and the close-up, specifically, the heritage of Vorkapich and Dreyer in making a film that is so fixated on the face, here to the end of brainwashing.
SCRIPT:
In Slavko Vorakpich’s conception of a dynamic cinema, what he called, true cinema, the close-up was an essential unit that revealed the medium’s inherent dynamism. The close-up transcends the linear purpose of narrative by drawing the viewer deeper into the stream of image: this distinguishes cinema from the exposition of literature and theatre. Going beyond mere description, the close-up summons those details to the viewer, in what becomes a confrontation, a shift in scale that transforms the scientific potential of cinema—to measure with precision—into the poetic potential of cinema—to abstract the subject by fracturing it in time. While Vorkapich applied his theories to the digressive-thematic montage, these beliefs were, above all, the pedagogical principles of a seasoned educator: from the vantage point of 1959, when he committed these words to paper, the future of cinema lay in its ability to repudiate the influence and pretence of exposition, of expository storytelling, in favour of an unfolding, through time and composition, elements that are naturally invoked by the intrusion of the close-up. The close-up had arrived through the utility of storytelling—when D.W. Griffith reveals the wrench in The Lonedale Operator, this is a departure from the theatrical proscenium, but it is also nothing more than a new direction for exposition. In Vorkapich’s poetics, there was no need that the close-up remain a tool of story; more than this, it could disrupt the uncanny of the photoplay to serve a greater truth. Vorkapich’s devotion to the close-up as an act-of-truth is anticipated in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. Vorkapich conceived of a montage in which details and their contexts might be intercut, or at least, where any intercutting with the close-up would enhance its meaning and vice versa. Dreyer, on the other hand, had achieved something of proven distinction from the literary and theatrical bias of cinema, for by making a tribute of uncommon devotion to an infamous act of suffering, composed almost entirely in close-ups on the face of the martyred, he offered evidence of what cinema could give the viewer that no play nor novel nor historian’s account ever could. The result is hypnotic: a study of the human face in trance, in judicious contemplation, in the interesting times of inquisitions, hysteria, and spiritual chasms.
When Nashville filmmaker Ron Ormond began to collaborate with the evangelical Baptist preacher Estus Pirkle on a series of Christian scare films, such thinking around film form was already in use, albeit rarely, largely through Vorkapich’s influence on an evolving style of fiction filmmaking in America. Ormond’s films were not poetically strategic; their style was, like that of the roughies and drive-in fare of exploitation cinema, born of utility. Nevertheless, Ormond’s collaborations with Pirkle became the focal point for his filmmaking following a near-death experience that purportedly led to Ormond’s own Road-to-Damascus rebirth. Ormond found himself making a new kind of film, one that’s intention was not only to convert, but that functioned through direct address, in other words, an illustrated sermon that would linger on the face of the preacher and on the faces of his congregants, often in close-up, lending a claustrophobic charge to the proceedings, the viewer held hostage in extremity. The face of Falconetti gave cinema its burning saint, the uncompromising beauty of spiritual conviction; the face of Estus Pirkle gives cinema something else, an inquisitor on the pulpit, demanding submission to a healing lord of love.
The first of the Ormond and Pirkle collaborations, If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do, is a dramatic interpretation of Pirkle’s central prophecy: that Communism will overtake America and transform it by force into a godless, oppressive society. In extreme caricature, Pirkle's Communists travel around mocking the faithful, separating families, brainwashing and even decapitating children. Ormond and Pirkle would follow this with The Burning Hell and The Believer’s Heaven, companion pieces that offer the preacher's visions of heaven and hell, Pirkle’s biblical literalism forming a jeremiad against permissive modern society. In all three films, Pirkle’s sermons are illustrated with anachronistic costume drama. Even as the preacher rejects metaphorical interpretations of such stories as parables, in the staging of them they become allegories for the faults of humankind that endure into the twentieth century. If Footmen Tire You gained a cult audience as a curio with an unintentionally comic bent, with its frothing-at-the-mouth anti-Communist ideology and its brutal conception of fascism; the others endured in much the same way, as their amateur drama, hysterical fantasy, and manipulative rhetoric resonated beyond the revivalist ministry, in the Church of Camp, from which the preacher’s red-baiting, fear mongering narration and the filmmaker’s exploitation roots could inspire mocking laughter.
Throughout the films, Pirkle hosts these stories from the pulpit, rather, multiple pulpits at a series of revivalist ministries where he is filmed delivering his stock sermon. His face often occupies the frame as he delivers his sermon in direct address: it is just as commonly held in dialogue with reaction shots on the faces of the congregation, whose expressions range from boredom, shock, rapt attention, the tear-filled eyes of those experiencing something profound. The intercutting of preacher and listener becomes hypnotic, adding to the hallucinatory power of the form even as Ormond mixes the presentational modes of the films, between the theatrics of the preacher, the amateur drama of his costumed characters, and more symbolic illustrations to resonate with Pirkle’s sermon. This hallucinatory power belongs both to the sermon and to the film; film and sermon become one. Into Pirkle’s sermons, characters are dropped who are experiencing crises of faith: Judy, whose promiscuity is revealed to be at odds with her upbringing, and Tim, a Jesus Freak whose friend has just died in a motorcycle crash. In listening to Pirkle, each finds salvation: their stories make Pirkle’s sermonizing urgent, and so they are testimonials to the sermon’s power. This mixing of presentational modes, between illustration, concurrent drama, and direct address, culminates in a montage that is designed to terrify the viewer, in which they are trapped in the narrow passage between the intent stares of the congregants and the face of Estus Pirkle. By the third film, the dramatic catalyst of the wayward soul has been dropped, replaced by a variety show format featuring guest singers.
The close-ups on Pirkle’s face are appeals to his own authority and to the emotions: Ormond offers Pirkle’s face as stern, paternal, and wise, and his piping, crisp, hypo-nasal voice and folksy Georgia accent enhance the hypnotic character of the film and sermon. Dreyer and Vorkapich were firm in their intentions to use the close-up: it distanced cinema from theatre, and the ways in which they used this unit, in a greater stream of images, allowed for new ways of seeing. Ormond uses close-ups on Pirkle to much the same end—affecting an emotional intensity that can only be realized through film—but doing so is a matter of utility, a means to an end, allowing Pirkle’s message to reach far more souls than he ever could through Sunday sermons. And yet, the close-up serves more than just sending Pirkle on tour: it makes his convictions and his stories, as hysterical and alarmist as they are, compelling and urgent. What begins in invitation ends in terror. In the course of an hour, these close-ups become the essential aesthetic of brainwashing, aided by the repetition of Pirkle’s message, which inevitably circles back to the need for salvation. Medium and messenger become one. Estus Pirkle becomes George Orwell’s Big Brother, the ever-present face of authority; like Orwell, Pirkle’s dire vision of the future is of a boot stamping on a face forever. That face is the face of Christ.
