AmishI documentary. Title: The Amish Date: 12/23/04 Time: 12:30 p.m. Library: West Linn Public Library II. I have heard very little about the Amish people. I always seem to hear jokes about them and conversations about how crazy they are for not using electricity. I decided that I actually wanted to know more about them to test the validity of the comments I hear.III. Other than the fact that the Amish are black, have flat hats, and don't use electricity, I know nothing about the Amish.IV. In this documentary, the filmmakers got their hands on a very articulate old Amish man. I loved hearing him talk about his life as a child. He explained a lot about his family and how they lived. There were several accounts of some of the activities they would do. For example, after church the boys would get together and play this ball game where one tried to hit another with a hard ball. I wouldn't expect many other Amish cultures to do this, but they imply in the video that this is what all Amish are like. Many stories were also told that showed how strict these people were and how closely they followed their religion. The documentary indicated that in order for the Amish to continue to make a living, more modernized tools had to be used. One of the recently accepted machines was the machine that milked cows mechanically. Without it, the Amish man explained, the Amish would not be able to survive. The man also explained that his family and other families in his community sometimes asked neighbors for a ride somewhere. Additionally, over time, the Amish were allowed to use public telephones located outside the village. I think it was great that the filmmakers were able to get a source like this, but I only really learned about the religion and the way of life through one person's stories. I'm sure many of the things his family or community did were not the same as every other Amish family or community did. Additionally, I was constantly recognizing sequences that I had seen before, in this very film. They were obviously only interested in a specific community. If there are thousands of different Amish people, there must be hundreds of different interpretations of the religion. I would have liked to see a different community and see how they lived to see if the Amish were really the same everywhere or if each community was unique.