Jesus Camp

Ahhhhh yes, Jesus Camp, one of my favorite documentaries. I watched this for the first time a few years ago, and recently revisited it. I think that this documentary is well done in a lot of ways. Whenever I watch this documentary I feel like it flies by. Some of the documentaries that I've watched this semester (most of the war ones) have kind of dragged, but this one keeps me interested from beginning to end.


For those of you who have never seen this, Netflix's synopsis is: "This documentary follows three kids at a controversial summer camp that grooms the next generation of conservative Christian political activists." So, these "Christian political activists" are extremist members of the Evangelical Church who run a controversial summer camp for young children. The woman at the forefront of this camp is Becky Fischer. 

Fischer thinks that God is assembling an army, and children are the answer. She starts recruiting kids as young as 4 years old. She is also very hateful towards Muslims and associates them all with terrorists. This camp is held in the Mid-western United States. 

One of the most promising recruits is Levi. He wants to be a preacher when he grows up, and he is very passionate about Jesus Christ. Fischer recognized this in him and had him preach a sermon at the camp. These sermons involve a lot of yelling, screaming, and crying. 

I think that brain washing children is unethical, so I was kind of disturbed while watching this, but there was one part of this documentary that disturbed me more than other parts. They brought in a guy that was pro-life and had him show the children little dolls of unborn fetuses and told them how other people kill babies before they're born....I don't think that a 7 year old is mature enough to handle this type of information, let alone form a solid opposition to the pro-choice side of the argument. They took some of the kids to D.C. and had them protest with duct tape over their mouths (Levi being one of them)

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The Anderson Platoon

Documentaries hold a unique and tricky place in the world of film. If you were to ask somebody: “What makes a film a documentary?” They will usually respond with a remark about “truth,” “facts,” or “representing reality.” When Henrik Juel, a Dutch film professor, is faced with these answers from his students in his film classes, he retorts by asking them if his “cousin can be justified in claiming that he is working on documentary films, when in fact what he does for a living is to install surveillance cameras at gas-stations and supermarkets,” (Juel). Juel goes on to explain that his cousin is “representing reality” and doing so “without the use of actors” therefore his cousin’s “films” would be considered non-fiction. This poses a problem for the previously stated idea about what makes a film a documentary. Juel goes on to argue that, “As a rule of thumb, a film is hardly a film without camera work, cuts or editing, and it is neither a fiction film nor a documentary if it is nothing more than a "re-presentation" of what happened to be in front of a lens and a microphone” (Juel). This is true about documentary filmmaking; in fact, I would go so far as to say that the editing of a documentary film is the most important and influential piece in the filmmaking process. What is left out of the documentary is arguably more important than what was included in the documentary. There is an element of manipulation to documentary filmmaking; that is, the filmmaker usually takes a political, ideological, or ethical stance while making the film. This stance that is taken by the filmmaker is usually the reason for making the film in the first place. A filmmaker will often feel passionate about what they are taking the time and effort to film, and their stance on the matter will be voiced through the editing process.



It is because of this element of documentary filmmaking that viewers must not take a documentary film as an absolute truth. When viewing and interpreting a documentary film, the viewer must keep in mind that every frame that is featured in the film was put there intentionally for a specific purpose. It is also important for an audience member to keep in mind that the documentary film that they are viewing is only voicing the one opinion of the filmmaker who has produced this film. If an audience member wants to get a better understanding of the event they should not rely solely on one documentary, but rather extend their outreach to other documentary films along with feature films about the event.


The Anderson Platoon was produced in 1967, but was shot in the heat of combat battle in 1966 by a French veteran of the Indochina war, Pierre Schoendoerffer. The film is shot using entirely raw footage of men in Vietnam, and is accompanied by voice over which gives context to the grainy black and white images on the screen. In his article, “The winning and losing of hearts and minds: Vietnam, Iraq, and the claims of the war documentary,” Tony Grajeda points out that the film, “Relies on the ‘voice of authority’ of the filmmaker that, along with a soundtrack mix of diegetic and post-production music, rhetorically arranges what is seen and heard within a seemingly ‘objective’ view of soldiering.” 

However, the film does take an anti-war stance by including gruesome scenes of soldiers and Vietnam civilians injured or dead as a direct result of the war.