Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple

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)

This story is so much more complex than news reports of the Guyana tragedy would have us believe. The members of The People's Temple had such altruistic intentions: they had a vision of a Utopian society where racial harmony and true brotherhood was the order of the day. They wanted to guarantee care for the poor, the elderly, children....and they wanted to create real community. This doco manages to tell the whole story, while honoring the pure intentions of the Temple members, and even shedding light on the paradoxical cult leader, Jim Jones - a man who was impressively liberal and progressive, politically, but frighteningly meglomaniacal and abusive, when it came to leading his "flock." The strength of this film lies in the fact that it isn't just a play-by-play from afar, but a collection of first-hand interviews with people who were actually there, and who knew the key players. A must-see for anyone who was alive and aware went these events took place.

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.

I saw this film Tuesday afternoon at the San Francisco International Film Festival and it was amazing. It had a running time of approx. 90 minutes but I'm not really sure because I couldn't take my eyes off of the screen. The film unfolds chronologically and covers the formative years of Jim Jones' life and the birth, rise and eventual demise of the People's Temple. The story is told through interviews with the surviving members of the People's Temple, their family members and the survivors of Congressman Leo Ryan's ill-fated trip to Guyana. The director of the film forces us to look at the People's Temple on it's own merits and set aside the preconceived notions we have regarding the "mass suicide" and the tired notion that the members of the church were cult members who enthusiastically drank cyanide laced kool-aid to ascend to heaven. The former members of the church come off as enlightened idealists who were searching for a life with meaning in a society that ignored them because of their poverty or the color of their skin and they found their champion in Jim Jones. This film doesn't ask questions and answer them; it provides you w/ information and you are forced to disseminate it yourself. We get to see Jones for what he was: a father, a political power broker, old time preacher, son of a dysfunctional family, molester, savior, integrationist and killer.The camera doesn't pass judgment on history it just records it. This documentary fills in the gaps of a story that we thought knew. The music, archival photos and film footage used are amazing. I would highly recommend this film to anyone who is interested in the subject. The documentary unfolds like a dream and takes you on ride through the history of the People's Temple, it grabs you and doesn't let go.

I saw this at the London Film Festival, and was impressed by what appeared to be a balanced picture - of both the Peoples Temple church and Jim Jones himself. The film is captivating in its chronological story telling, leading up to the tragic events in Guyana.

However I did find the repeat use of some archival footage a bit weak, and unless I missed it, it was never explained that the "Planning Commission" was part of the Peoples Temple itself.

Like any good documentary, it left me wanting to find out more, but I did think that it was an omission not to attempt any consideration of what led Jones to turn what had been a beneficial organisation, into a murderous one. Neither does the film attempt to look into how the organisation was run - presumably Jones couldn't have directly controlled the 1,000 inhabitants of Jonestown? The source of the poison and weapons is also a subject that doesn't feature, or the question of what happened to the money afterwards?

Overall this is a really interesting film, especially for those of us who were too young to remember the events.