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MARIAL in the News
Documentarian decides to call Covington home
Newton Citizen
Chris J. Starrs
Friday, July 16, 2004
Why would a New Jersey-born college professor, who has lived and
worked in such exotic and academic locales as Berkeley, the South
Pacific, Chicago, New York City and Atlanta, decide to call Covington
home?
It’s simple, said Emory University professor Bradd Shore,
who moved into his antebellum home near the downtown Square in June.
Covington reminded him of his own hometown.
“I grew up in a small town,” said Shore, whose documentary
film on the annual Salem Camp Meeting, “Family Revival,”
will be screened at the camp meeting Sunday evening. “And
I always missed it. People are amazingly friendly and open and have
made us feel extremely welcome.”
For the time being, Shore and Linda, his wife of 28 years, also
call a townhouse near Emory home. Shore has served as a faculty-in-residence
for the university for the past two years and still resides part-time
in the dwelling. “We have a townhouse and a country house,”
he joked.
Shore is well familiar with Newton County, as he’s spent the
last several years working on the Salem documentary and on research
for Emory’s Myth and Ritual in American Life Center in the
area. The Shores’ daughter Emily attended Oxford College and
Shore’s secretary at Emory resides in Covington.
After earning his undergraduate degree in English Renaissance literature
from Berkeley in the late 1960s, Shore spent two years with the
Peace Corps in Western Samoa, and then returned to the United States
to study for his masters and Ph.D. at the University of Chicago.
He began teaching at the University of California at Santa Cruz
and then spent five years teaching at Sarah Lawrence in New York
before joining the faculty at Emory in 1982.
As director of the MARIAL Center at Emory, Shore has spent time
researching middle-class working family life, which brought him
to Covington in the first place. He decided to make “Family
Revival” after several visits to Salem, and the documentary
is his first foray into filmmaking.
“Between my idea and my very talented editor’s skill
in putting together the narrative, I’m very proud of the film,”
he said. “Basically, we were a bunch of novices, and what
we ended up with is pretty credible, considering it was our first
shoot.”
The 50-minute “Family Revival” has been broadcast on
Covington Cable TV and Shore has sent the film to 30 different Public
Broadcasting System stations across the country for possible broadcast.
The film has also been exhibited at the American Folklore Society
Film Festival and a film festival at UCLA.
Covington Mayor Sam Ramsey — a member of the Salem Board of
Trustees — has offered his praise of the documentary, and
Shore looks forward to getting feedback from camp meeting attendees
after they’ve viewed the finished product.
“I'm not really nervous about that,” Shore said. “We’re
open to criticism — I can learn a lot from it. I’ve
got enough experience to know you won’t please everybody.
I wanted the film to have an edge to it. We're not publicity agents
for Salem, but we didn’t introduce cynicism into it either.
“I feel the film is effective in capturing the experience
of attending camp meetings for a lifetime. People who have seen
it have told me it captures exactly how they feel about (Salem).
It appears the film did what we set out to do.”
Staff Photo: Sue Ann Kuhn-Smith
Bradd Shore sits in front of the tabernacle at Salem Camp Ground.
His film, “Family Revival,” will be screened at the
Salem Camp Meeting Sunday evening.
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