The Apocalyptic is the Mother of All Christian Theology

VDB is pleased to present a new VDB TV program featuring Jim Finn's The Apocalyptic is the Mother of All Christian Theology (2023), a psychedelic portrait of the founding theorist of Christianity.

The film tells the story of Paul the Apostle’s life, ideology, and influence, by piecing together 20th century 16mm and cassette propaganda, board games, animation, reenactments, Roman Empire doom metal and covers of Catholic liturgical music. The gentle Paul themes of flute, acoustic guitar, and mellotron contrast with the Demonic Roman Empire themes of electric guitar, drums and synth. Performance artist Linda Mary Montano and Usama Alshaibi portray Paul on his journey. The film tries to capture the disturbing reaction Paul and his letters had in the early days of Christianity. The use of live action, animation, found footage and original music was a way to recover his biography from the brains of 20th century humans so that in some perhaps misguided utopian impulse, we can build something new out of it for the future.

"Holy reconstructions of the sons of God, Jim Finn! Our favorite political atomizer gets holy in his new documentary crusade and decides to tell the story of Paul, the apostle who, the cheap internet would say, was “the most ardent propagandist of Christianism.” Finn, alongside artists Linda Mary Montano and Ulsama Alshaibi, goes all scissorhands using 16mm institutional shorts, board game commercials, cassette tapes, trashy animations and, of course, period performances of not-so-doubtful quality—a rosary of archive footage that evolves in the map of pop culture, its praying and its saints. Psychedelic and ferocious, Finn extracts waste from the 20th century and, Doc Brown-style, uses it to make miracles based on science (that of film) that stare into the future." - Juan Manuel Dominguez, BAFICI

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT   

The founding theorist of Christianity—Paul of Tarsus—met resurrected Jesus outside Damascus and spent the rest of his life expanding an obscure messianic sect of Judaism to the pagan communities of the eastern Mediterranean. Piecing together propaganda films, VHS tapes, audio cassettess, board games and other detritus from church rummae sales, writer/director Jim Finn is the guide through Paul's life, ideology and influence with the help of animation, video synthesizers and reenactments. References to Paul’s letters regularly appear with numbers and colons in the bios of professional baseball players and Republican staffers. And each year new books and articles are written about Paul as theologian, worker, feminist and queer ally, Jewish mystic, missionary and rhetorician. But still many of the basic ideas of who he was and what he believed still escape us. This story is told by creating portraits from his life, obsessions and legends based on the ancient Greek words in his letters: Apocalypsis (unmasking, unveiling, revelation), Charismata (divinely conferred gifts), Porneia (illicit sexual activity weirdly translated as fornication), Ethnos (pagan gentiles), Ekklesia (democratic assembly of believers), Koinonia (fellowship), Stenazo (the groaning pain of laboring through childbirth), Pistis (faithfulness or loyalty) and Parousia (presence of God, the arrival of the Kingdom of God on Earth). 

Composer Colleen Burke brought together musicians like Jim White (The Dirty Three) and Munaf Rayani (Explosions in the Sky) for this soundtrack based on 1970s Catholic liturgical music and Nordic metal. The gentle Paul themes with flute, acoustic guitar and mellotron contrasts with the Demonic Roman Empire themes of electric guitar, drums and synth.