Zeitgeist: The Movie

This article is about the 2007 film. For other uses, see Zeitgeist (disambiguation).

Zeitgeist: The Movie
Directed by	Peter Joseph
Written by	Peter Joseph
Produced by	Peter Joseph
Edited by	Peter Joseph
Music by	Peter Joseph
Distributed by	GMP LLC
Release date	June 18, 2007
Running time	122 min
Language	English

Zeitgeist: The Movie is a 2007 documentary film by Peter Joseph that asserts a number of ideas, including a mythological origin of Christianity, alternate theories for the parties responsible for the September 11th attacks, and finally, that bankers manipulate the international monetary system and the media in order to consolidate power.

THIS MOVIE IS THE WILL BLOW YOUR MIND FOOL! The film was officially released online on June 18, 2007 on zeitgeistmovie.com. In addition to attracting significant public interest, it has been criticized for reported factual inaccuracies, and the quality of its arguments. A sequel, Zeitgeist: Addendum, focuses further on the monetary system and advocates a resource-based social system influenced by the ideas of Jacque Fresco and The Venus Project. Following Zeitgeist: Addendum, Peter Joseph created an organization called The Zeitgeist Movement to promote the ideas of Fresco's Venus Project. A third film called Zeitgeist: Moving Forward is scheduled to be released in January 2011. Peter Joseph has stated that its topics will focus on human behavior, technology, and rationality.

Synopsis

Horus left and Jesus right, both presented in the film as "solar messiahs".

The film opens with animated abstract visualizations, film and stock footage, a cartoon and audio quotes about spirituality, followed by clips of war, explosions, and the September 11 attacks. This is followed by the film's title screen. The film's introduction ends with a portion of the late comedian George Carlin's monologue on religion accompanied by an animated cartoon.

Part I, entitled The Greatest Story Ever Sold, questions religions as being god-given stories, arguing that the Christian religion specifically is mainly derived from other religions, astronomical facts, astrological myths and traditions, which in turn were derived from or shared elements with others. In furtherance of the Jesus myth hypothesis, this part argues that the historical Jesus is a literary and astrological hybrid, nurtured politically.

The 9/11 attacks are the subject of Part II of the film.

Part II, entitled All the World's a Stage, uses integral footage of several 9/11 conspiracy theory films to illustrate how the September 11 attacks were either orchestrated or allowed to happen by elements within the United States government in order to generate mass fear, initiate and justify the War on Terror, provide a pretext for the curtailment of civil liberties, and produce economic gain. These claims include that the US government had advance knowledge about the attacks, the response of the military deliberately let the planes reach their targets, and the World Trade Center buildings 1, 2, and 7 underwent a controlled demolition.

The United States Government's income tax is claimed to be unconstitutional.

Part III, entitled Don't Mind the Men Behind the Curtain, argues that three wars of the United States during the twentieth century were waged purely for economic gain by what the film refers to as "international bankers". The film alleges that certain events were engineered as excuses to enter into war including the sinking of the RMS Lusitania, the Attack on Pearl Harbor, and the Gulf of Tonkin Incident.

According to the film, the US was forced by the Federal Reserve Bank to become embroiled in these wars, not with a view to win but to sustain the conflict, as this forces the US government to borrow money from the bank, allegedly increasing the profits of the "international bankers". The film then goes on to claim that the Federal Income Tax is illegal.

This section also claims the existence of a secret agreement to merge the United States, Canada and Mexico into a "North American Union". The creation of this North American Union is then alleged to be a step towards the creation of "One World Government." The film speculates that under such a government, every human could be implanted with an RFID chip to monitor individuals and suppress dissent.

An updated version of Zeitgeist released in 2010 removes the North American Union section among other changes.

Awards

The film was screened on November 10, 2007 at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood as part of the 4th Annual Artivist Film Festival, where it won the Best Feature Award in the Artivist Spirit category for feature-length documentaries. In September 2008, Zeitgeist, The Movie also received a Special Acknowledgment Award at Rutger Hauer's ICFILMS Film Festival in Milan, Italy.

Critical reaction

Media

A review in The Irish Times entitled “Zeitgeist: the Nonsense” wrote that “these are surreal perversions of genuine issues and debates, and they tarnish all criticism of faith, the Bush administration and globalization—there are more than enough factual injustices in this world to be going around without having to invent fictional ones." Skeptic magazine's Tim Callahan criticizes the first part of the film on the origins of Christianity:

Some of what it asserts is true. Unfortunately, this material is liberally—and sloppily—mixed with material that is only partially true and much that is plainly and simply bogus. […] Zeitgeist is The Da Vinci Code on steroids.

Other reviews assert that it is "conspiracy crap", “based solely on anecdotal evidence” and “fiction couched in a few facts”, or disparaging reference is made to its part in the 9/11 truth movement.

Filmmaker Dmitri Bushny, writing in the Russian weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta, was a rare voice in the mainstream press in praising the film, saying that it "utterly destroyed the official version" of the September 11 attacks. Acknowledging widespread criticism of part 2 as "internet nonsense", he defended the film for raising questions about the attacks, arguing that "there is no distortion in putting forward rational questions and trying to answer them. This is done persuasively, and no perception of underhand shuffling or manipulation arises."

Some journalists have focused on it as an example of how conspiracy theories are propagated in the internet age. For example, Ivor Tossell in the Globe and Mail argued that contradictions in the film are overwhelmed by passion and effective use of video editing:

The film is an interesting object lesson on how conspiracy theories get to be so popular... It's a driven, if uneven, piece of propaganda, a marvel of tight editing and fuzzy thinking. Its on-camera sources are mostly conspiracy theorists, co-mingled with selective eyewitness accounts, drawn from archival footage and often taken out of context. It derides the media as a pawn of the International Bankers, but produces media reports for credibility when convenient. The film ignores expert opinion, except the handful of experts who agree with it. And yet, it's compelling. It shamelessly ploughs forward, connecting dots with an earnest certainty that makes you want to give it an A for effort.

Filipe Feio, reflecting upon the film's internet popularity in Diário de Notícias, stated that "Fiction or not, Zeitgeist, The Movie threatens to become the champion of conspiracy theories of today."

Scholarly responses

Michael Shermer, founder of the Skeptics Society, mentioned Zeitgeist in an article in Scientific American on skepticism in the age of mass media, and the postmodern belief in the relativism of truth. He argues that this belief, coupled with a "clicker culture of mass media," results in a multitude of various truth claims packaged in "infotainment units", such as Zeitgeist, Loose Change, Poltergeist, or The Twilight Zone.

Jane Chapman, a film producer and reader in media studies at the University of Lincoln, called Zeitgeist "a fast-paced assemblage of agitprop", an example of unethical film-making. She accuses Joseph of deceit through the use of unreferenced and undated assertions, and standard film-making propaganda techniques. While parts of the film are, she says, "comically" self-defeating, the nature of “twisted evidence” and use of Madrid bomb footage to imply it is of the London bombings (she approvingly cites a student journalist who calls it an "out and out lie") amount to ethical abuse in sourcing (in later versions of the movie, a subtitle is added to this footage identifying it as from the Madrid bombings). She finishes her analysis with the comment:

Thus legitimate questions about what happened on 9/11, and about corruption in religious and financial organizations, are all undermined by the film’s determined effort to maximize an emotional response at the expense of reasoned argument.

Chris Forbes, Senior lecturer in Ancient History of Macquarie University and member of the Synod of the Diocese of Sydney, has severely criticized Part I of the movie, asserting that it has no basis in serious scholarship or ancient sources, and that it relies on amateur sources that recycle frivolous ideas from one another, rather than serious academic sources, commenting, "It is extraordinary how many claims it makes which are simply not true."

Examining some of specific claims made by the film, Forbes points out that while there are parallels between the story of Jesus and many other ancient mythological figures, many of the ones mentioned in the film are false, as are other aspects of the film's description of these myths. Forbes states that there is no evidence in Egyptian sources that Horus' mother Isis was a virgin, and claims that Ra was the Egyptian god of the sun, not Horus. Similarly, neither Krishna nor Dionysus nor Attis were ever said to be born of virgins, as Krishna was the eighth child of his parents, Devaki and Vasudeva, and Dionysus' mother, Semele, had slept with Zeus. Forbes asserts that Horus was not adored by three kings, and that neither he nor Attis were crucified nor resurrected. Forbes and interviewer John Dickson, founder of the Centre for Public Christianity, took issue with what they perceived as an argument centered on the homophony between the words "Sun" and "Son" in regards to Jesus, with Forbes dismissing this point as a pun, and pointing out that those words are not homophonic in ancient Egyptian, Latin or Greek. Forbes also points out that neither Horus, Attis nor Jesus were born on December 25, as the ancient Egyptian calendar did not include the month of December found in the Latin calendar, and that the date of Christmas is a celebratory tradition historically derived from Sol Invictus and Saturnalia, rather than any information derived from the Bible.

Forbes also criticizes the movie's use of Roman sources to suggest that Jesus did not exist, noting that the list of supposed contemporaneous historians alleged by the film to have not mentioned Jesus is actually a list of geographers, literature professors, poets, philosophers and writers on farming or gardening, who would not be expected to mention him, and that the modern sources cited in the film are either experts in fields other than ancient history, such as German literature, or uncredentialed amateur Egyptologists. Forbes challenges the film's allegation that Josephus' mention of Jesus was doctored by pointing out that Josephus actually mentions Jesus twice, and that only one of these mentions is believed by scholars to have been doctored in the Middle Ages, in order to change an already existing mention of him. Forbes also argues that while Emperor Constantine I legalized Christianity, it was Theodosius I who made it compulsory later in the 4th century, and that contrary to the film's thesis, and that Constantine did not invent the historical Jesus, as early records show that his historicity was already a key element of early Christianity prior to Constantine's conversion to it.

See also

• The Zeitgeist Movement
• Bible conspiracy theory
• Christ myth theory
• Jesus Christ in comparative mythology
• 9/11 conspiracy theories
• Money as Debt

External links

• The Zeitgeist Film Series Gateway
• Official Website for Zeitgeist: The Movie
• Zeitgeist: The Movie at IMDb
• Skeptic: The Greatest Story Ever Garbled by Tim Callahan
• Zeitgeist Debunked with guest Tim Callahan Reasonable Doubts podcast
• Interview with ancient historian Dr Chris Forbes at Centre for Public Christianity