Synopsis:

Copyright Andrew Douglas

With its long, fluid takes across barren and gothic landscapes, and portrait shots of still musicians revealed by the camera as it sweeps across the scene, Searching for the Wrong Eyed Jesus looks like an extended music video crossed with the production values of a fiction film. This is perhaps unsurprising as the film is the documentary debut of photographer and music promo-cum-commercials director Andrew Douglas.

Alt-Country singer Jim White is our guide through a vision of the American South that is created by music, testimony and atmospheric photography. In a 1970 Chevy Impala with a sizeable statue of Jesus sticking out of his boot, White takes us on the road, though one-road towns to diners, bars, a prison, a barbers and - of course - numerous churches, his reflections on the character of the South providing a twisted narrative. One of his analogies as he tries to explain his relationship with the place is that it is like trying to drive along the white lines of the road, impossible to do if you look directly at the lines, possible only when you keep your eye on the road ahead. "If you look directly at something," he concludes, "it's inapprehendable. Sometimes you gotta look away before you can achieve something." The film takes this on board: there is no attempt at verité camerawork or other conventional observational techniques, and whenever there is a danger of that happening, a jump cut quickly moves the viewer away again. Instead, frames are half-filled or empty, and the stories, anecdotes and ruminations that people share would be conversational were it not for the snaking of the camera revealing the landscape around them. The truth of the South is not in what is presented to us, the film is saying, but in what is around and behind that façade: something far more intangible.

It's a mythical kind of South that we are shown, where religion pervades everything and all stories link back to themes of sin, penance and - far less often - redemption. In this sense it's a fairly clean, uncomplicated South, minus the politics or the bombardment of everyday living. Everyone's a philosopher, though none more so than White himself whose crystalline moment is when demonstrating to us the workings of society using an ice cream cone. In a startling sequence inside a Pentecostal church, the stories of hellfire and salvation are made manifest as the congregation reach rapture, including a young boy shaking and speaking in tongues, supported and egged on by the pastor and a group of women.

The most important element of this film though has to be the music. It is the musicians themselves who provide the film's commentary, sometimes sharing their experiences but more often than not to be found performing amidst the scenes themselves, an integral part of the landscape. Full of melancholic philosophy, this is the spirit of the South. As White says towards the end of the film: "in a poor world like this gravity seems stronger. It's pulling you down into the earth and it's a fight not to disappear."

Perhaps the film ultimately conforms to our expectations of what the South is, but as one Southern viewer on the internet concluded, this isn't always far from the truth. Beautifully shot and tangibly atmospheric with a fantastic soundtrack, it's not just for music fans.