Last night, Zachary Godshall -with whom I’m acquainted through Will and my doppelganger- screened for three of us his new documentary, God’s Architects. It was astonishing and extremely moving; if you care at all about art, obsession, and the expressions of love, devotion, hope, and madness humans undertake, you’ll love it.
The film is an immersion in five subjects: a blissful squatter in the California desert who is building “God is Love” mountain; a muscular Arkansas Mason erecting a protective memorial castle for his deceased daughter; a 92-year old minister in Vicksburg who preached on a converted bus and assembled a pink-and-red sculpture garden to attract converts; a Tennessean in mourning for his brother who created a castle next to the houses he built from spare lumber; and an absent and ghostly south Louisiana man, whose bizarre sculptural park is now unintelligible in its iconography.
I assume it is bland and banal to mention Errol Morris in discussing a documentary, but although Godshall’s film is in no way derivative in technique or concept to an Errol Morris movie, it shares something: a movingly non-judgmental evenness, a compassionate capacity to find humor and profundity in men who might otherwise be viewed as loons.
As a curation of astounding folk art -uninstructed architecture and strange decorations- the film is wonderful. But as an exploration of how people -some mad, some made miserable by tragedy- strike out to build structures of meaning and connect them haphazardly with religion, with art, with folk tales, the film is one of the most moving I’ve seen.
He’s still finishing it, and the next screening will be at LSU on October 28th. I hope that, should you be interested, you can see it some day soon. In the meantime, there is a MySpace page for it.
(Like all great movies, this one resists encapsulation in a trailer).
