JONESTOWN: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple (2006)
10pm, Regal 4
Director: Stanley Nelson
Writer: Marcia Smith
Cinematographer: Michael Chin
Cast:
Running Time: 85 min
The 1970s were years of intense social and cultural tumult. To the followers of the charismatic and forceful Jim Jones, the “Peoples Temple”Â? offered the perfect balance of spiritual fulfillment and political commitment. Jones not only preached about integration and equality, but also built an organization that provided food, clothing, and shelter to his congregation and his community. On the surface, Jim Jones and his multiracial congregation espoused the values of a model society. So how did a decades-long, church-based experiment in communal living lead to murder and “revolutionary suicide”Â? in a tiny South American country?
On November 18, 1978, over 900 members of Peoples Temple died in the largest mass suicide/murder in history. Using never-before-seen archival footage and survivor interviews, director Stanley Nelson and writer Marcia Smith explore the inner workings of Peoples Temple and the paradox at its core –the visionary quest for social justice and the extreme personality disorder that together drove Jones and held his followers in sway. This revealing documentary focuses on the issues that defined the Peoples Temple –faith and zealotry, revolution and utopia, race and class, loyalty and coercion, charismatic leadership and demagoguery –while presenting the human story of the people who followed Jim Jones from Indiana to California and finally to the remote jungles of Guyana, South America in a misbegotten quest to build an ideal society.
The inescapable fact that smart, decent people by the hundreds believed that Jim Jones had set them free and followed him into death without hesitation is uncomfortable to consider. Jonestown was built not by neo-Nazis or born-again Left Behinders, but by a coalition of liberal-to-radical African-Americans and whites. The film is not a posthumous character assassination, which would be all too easy and unnecessary. Rather, the filmmakers bravely and impartially depict the positive deeds Jones accomplished, such as bringing racial equality to his church when that was an opinion so unpopular that death threats rolled in. The story is told by its participants: church members, relatives of the dead, and most hauntingly by two of the five (and there were only five!) survivors who managed to escape into jungle that fateful day in November of 1978.
Many of Jones former followers still cherish the good times when, before devolving into the siege-mentality totalitarianism that was its undoing in San Francisco and Guyana, Peoples Temple realized an agrarian ideal in Northern California. If they were a deranged, personality cult (and they certainly had become one by the end), they also were a multiracial and progressive political force, a combination of socialism and evangelical Christianity that seemed irresistibly attractive to many alienated people in the California of the 1970s. As detailed in the film, Jones was a poor white kid from Indiana who grew up with an unusual sense of compassion for African-Americans–but also with remarkable oratorical powers and a strange preoccupation with death. The documentarians dug up audio and video recordings of Jones’ sermons as early as 1953, and recollections by his childhood friends that are chillingly prescient.
Director Stanley Nelson, a 2002 MacArthur “genius”Â? Fellow, is an award-winning filmmaker best known for his groundbreaking documentaries (”The Murder of Emmett Till“Â?, “Sweet Honey in the Rock: Raise Your Voice“Â?) that illuminate critical but overlooked history. For Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, the amazingly detailed visual record of the last days of Guyana were furnished by the film crew that accompanied Congressman Leo Ryan. Ryan’s aide and a soundman, who survived their wounds from the sneak attack that killed the congressman and his cameraman, provide running commentary.
