Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple

I saw this in San Francisco, where the Peoples Temple was located in the 70s. Former Peoples Temple members and the director and writer of the movie were present (and there was discussion after the screening). It was certainly a powerful place and way to see it, but I think the movie stands on its own. It does a good job of showing what attracted people to the Peoples Temple and how, gradually, things started to go very wrong. There is footage from the days of the Peoples Temple as well as new and moving testimony (that feels like the right word) from former members and family of members.

It's not clear if it will get distributed theatrically but, if not, the director said it will air on PBS in 2007. Highly recommended.

This film documents the life of Jim Jones, his emergence as a charismatic and successful religious figure, and his eventual downfall.

The whole People's Temple story always struck me as just another of the 60's cult phenomena. We had Rajneesh and his farm, and uncountable other guru's who exploited, and continue to exploit, large numbers of gullible followers. The Moonies are still with us, but well below the radar most of the time.

What's odd about Jim Jones -- to me, anyway -- is that no one really seems to know who this guy really was. This film gives more insight than anything else I've seen or read. It talks about his childhood, which was extremely poor, and his family situation, which was equally grim, so we get some insight there. But he was a very carefully guarded fellow. Always wearing those shades, always talking in the manner of a preacher. But who was he really? What was he like when he took off the robes and had a beer? We may never know. His followers certainly didn't know, and no doubt that's a major part of the problem. There is one scene in this documentary in which Jones is standing at the back of a group of people at a large gathering, and his demeanor reminded me of the dictator in North Korea -- it was that kind of vague, arrogant, totally in control look. Spooky.

The most telling comment in this film was the remark made by one of the PT's former members, who said "No one ever goes and joins a cult. They join a church, or a club." But what is the tipping point at which people can tolerate psychological and physical abuse against themselves and their friends? We don't get an answer to that. The people who made this film didn't have to tell us the answer, but it would have been a better film if they had.

This is one of these stories that can be revisited over and over again while trying to understand what actually happened. What are the reasons that make people do horrible things without really wanting or understanding why do they do them. It is a film about collective delusion and manipulation... or maybe it is a film about fear and uncertainty towards life?

Well, I wish I could answer these questions after this documentary. But I can't, because despite it's very acceptable technical quality, the choice of a chronological narration doesn't do much to add depth to a character larger than life as Jim Jones was.

The film did a lot to enlighten me in the origins of the church, it's racial integration and also its claims against social inequality. But the character itself remains a mystery to me. His motivations, the techniques he used to control his followers. It is all depicted very lightly and without much intellectual depth. There are moments when some of the cult followers say things about Jones that could be further explored, but unfortunately the director chooses to leave them as nearly an anecdote.

And this is what I think it is the biggest concern I have against this very interesting film. The narration makes Jones appear as an eccentric egomaniac. But the truth is that one hints there was so much more in his plans. It is just not plausible that he just made up the mass suicide- murder idea on the go. There is something utterly well thought out about how everything happened. This is pure evil at work, not very different to the Jew extermination by the Nazis. There was a plan, and I am sure that in this case there was a very well laid out plan. But the film makes it all appear almost as random as the weather.

It is a pity, because the archive footage is varied and excellent. But I can't help but wonder what Errol Morris would have done of this film. Probably a masterpiece, because he would have made what he does best: Portray characters with total precision.

Still, an interesting documentary to watch.

This is a sad, chilling documentary about the rise and fall of psychopathic cult leader Jim Jones's People's Temple. Back home in Indiana, Jones had a morbid fascination with death and charismatic religion as early as age 5. He displayed an admirable acceptance of people of color, but he also killed small animals to serve as subjects for death rituals he conducted, a disturbing trait not uncommonly associated with adult personality leanings toward callous violence.

Untrained in the ministry, he nonetheless started his own church in Indiana - an offshoot of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) - while still in his early 20s, later, in 1965, moving it west to a rural commune-like setting in Ukiah, in Northern California, when he was 34, where he also renamed the church People's Temple Full Gospel Church.

After 9 years, in 1974 he moved the church again, this time to San Francisco, where he ingratiated himself with local politicos like George Moscone and Willie Brown, and, in return for his support of Moscone for Mayor, Jones was appointed to the city's housing commission. By 1977 Jones had the itch to move again, and this time his church bought a large tract of land in the interior of Guyana, in northwestern South America. There a settlement, Jonestown, was rapidly established to permanently house over 1,000 church members. In November, 1978, after receiving complaints that all was not well in Jonestown, that people were being forcibly separated from loved ones back home and more or less held hostage, a California Congressman, Leo Ryan, made a trip to Jonestown to see for himself what was going on.

Ryan never returned, for he was shot and killed on the aircraft runway at Jonestown by armed stooges of Jones's, on orders to do so because Jones feared that Ryan would bring trouble if allowed to return to the States. Later that same day, November 18, 1978, Jones used his extensive PA system to order all of his supplicants to take a cyanide drink, to escape the misery that would befall Jonestown once authorities came in large numbers, to go on over to the other side, i.e., presumably to Heaven, where they would find peace.

911 church members died that day, many infants and children given poison by their parents, who then also took the poison drink to create possibly the largest mass suicide in history. Some who did not take poison were, like Rep. Ryan, shot to death. This was also the apparent cause of death for Jones himself. Another 80 members were away on some sort of field trip and were spared.

This is the fifth and perhaps most unusual of director Stanley Nelson's documentaries, which always concern race and the African-American condition (his prior feature films have taken up black press journalists; Marcus Garvey; Oaks Bluff, a black summer community on Martha's Vineyard; and the musical group Sweet Honey in the Rock).

Nelson's interest in Jonestown is connected with the fact that a majority of Jones's supplicants were black. Jones pandered to the suffering of poor blacks and whites alike. He also had sex with many women in the church, and even offered to sodomize anyone - female or male - who asked for or wanted this kind of connection to him, and apparently many did.

Nelson's approach here is intensely personal. He intercuts archival footage - of Jones's life, his activities and various stages in the development of his church - with contemporary interviews of persons who lost loved ones in Guyana. There are no talking heads: no sociologists, no academics who study religious cults, not a single mental health professional to educate us here. Nelson doesn't want us to understand the root causes of this tragedy; he wants us to feel the pain, the grief that this horrible and senseless loss of life wrought, just to feed the craving for power that was obviously Jones's main source of sustenance. It is an agonizing story to witness. My grades: 7/10, B (Seen on 11/25/06)

Ah yes, another opportunity to mention The Wire as all fans tirelessly (and tiresomely) do; I was reminded of the Jonestown massacre (and that is how I see it) by a Spearhead track on the series soundtrack and coincidentally this film was on a week or so after I heard it. My knowledge of the events in Jonestown can be summarised into one short sentence so this film interested me by offering more than a simple summary. Using footage from inside the People's Temple movement as well as interviews with former members this builds the story chronologically from early stages through to the tragic conclusion to the movement.

There are many challenges and traps associated with telling this story and mostly this film works because it avoids the majority of them and deals well with the telling. The first challenge is to get the viewer to a point where it is at least understandable how Jones could lead such a movement to such an extent. One of the contributors says that nobody sets out to join a cult that will hurt them but yet the film makes it reasonably clear why so many people ultimately did and why so many people put up with so much out-and-out weirdness and oppression. In doing this the material naturally suggests that Jones is a monster or crazy and it would have been easy to ham this aspect up with music etc to the detriment of the film. As it works out, the film doesn't do this and instead lets events speak for themselves without really pulling cheap tricks to sensationalise or demonise anyone unnecessarily.

As a result it all comes over even handed and fair. The heavy use of those directly involved makes it a lot more interesting than a heavy narrator-led approach because you hear things first hand and have an insiders perception of events. Some viewers will feel the lack of conspiracy in the film but I did not because the film was on the general sweep of the tragedy rather than suggested stories behind it. OK so the material does a lot of the work by having a lot of inherent interest within it but even still this documentary is effectively structured with a good personal presentation that gets inside the world of the People's Temple and Jonestown.