Film Reviews	Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple by M. Faust

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Trailer for "Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple"

Only Charles Manson ranks higher as a modern bogeyman in the American consciousness than the Reverend Jim Jones, a ranking that places gruesomeness over quantity: The Manson murders may have been grislier, but in numbers they can’t begin to compete with the more than 900 people who died at Jones’ camp in the jungles of Guyana. And it remains the more ungraspable atrocity—even allowing for the number of children, elderly and infirm who were fed the cyanide-laced Kool-Aid, how could so many people be induced to take part in mass suicide? The new documentary Jonestown does its best to answer those and other questions in a running time of less than 90 minutes, which is clearly not enough; it answers some questions but raises many more. It is most valuable for trying to show what drew people to Jones’ congregation in the first place: his insistence on racial equality and social equity, mixed with the skills of a trained Pentecostal preacher, made his vision of a man-made utopia seem possible to people of the 1960s and 1970s who were primed for the Age of Aquarius. Which is not to say that Jones’ followers were hippies: Director Stanley Nelson interviews survivors of Jonestown along with members who left earlier to paint a portrait of them as average people yearning for a better world. That rationality makes their recounting of the events of November 18, 1978 even more chilling than you might imagine. Nelson (the recipient of a MacArthur “genius” fellowship) has also assembled an astonishing amount of film and audio showing Jones and the Guyana camp, and you can hardly blame him for wanting to display it, even if the time might have better been spent going into a little more detail. For what it is, though, Jonestown is a valuable addition to the our understanding of demagoguery at its extremes, It plays on Wednesday and Thursday, December 6 and 7, at the Emerging Cinema screen of the Market Arcade Film and Arts center.