San Francisco International Film Festival: Day #13 San Francsico Tragedy Doubleshot.
Have we hit Film Festival burnout? We’re almost home.
Film(s): The Bridge and Jonestown: The Life and Death of the People’s Temple.
What are they?
The Bridge is a documentary about The Golden Gate Bridge which is the world’s #1 suicide spot. Filmmaker Eric Steel captured 6 people leaping to their death’s off the bridge. Jonestown is a documentary/oral history of The People’s Temple which achieved its greatest following in the mid 1970s in San Francisco before moving to the utopian community of Jonestown in Guyana and, on November 18, 1978, committed mass suicide by drinking cyniade laced punch.
Why did I see them?
San Francisco’s dark and tragic history fascinates me as much as its triumphs. As my adopted home, I consider its past mine too, even though I wasn’t here back then.
Did I Like it?
Both of them, yes.
The Bridge plays as a eulogy, both to the 24 people who leap to their deaths from the Golden Gate Bridge every year but to the city’s image of itself. The Golden Gate Bride was constructed during the height of the Great Depression, an engineering marvel long before computer modeling. It not only represents the triumph of human ingenuity and risk that so embodies California but serves as San Francisco’s visual ambassador to the world. That it has represented promise and possibility for so many and hopelessness exit for just as many encapsulates the fragility of this place, a mythical city on hill where the ground rumbles violently beneath it.
The Bridge doesn’t offer sociological or cultural explanations of the allure of the Golden Gate the way the New Yorker article that inspired it does. Instead it sticks to interviews with family members and terrible, disturbing footage of those who jump. It isn’t the documentary I would made on this subject but it works. Those protesting it (it is San Francisco. A protest on every corner) obviously haven’t seen it. It’s no more exploitative than an obituary.
Jonestown: The Life and Death of the People’s Temple makes similarly interesting choices. The only interviews are with either members of The People’s Temple or their relatives. The wealth of archival footage shows People’s Temple as joyful celebrations of love of brotherhood, earily similar to Glide Memorial Church, a paragon of San Francisco’s religious tolerance.
We know the history. We know Jim Jones was a power-hungry scumbag who abused his followers and then murdered them while preaching racial equality, the enemies at the gate and dying with dignity. What I didn’t know is how seductive his message was, how it appeals to both angry hippies and elderly religious women and how the members of People’s Temple were not dupes but flawed spiritual searchers like each of us. The horror of their deaths is compounded by what we hope never meets us at the end of that search, a betrayal of trust, a reason to discount faith as worthless.
That the San Francisco site of the People’s Temple (now a post office) was about 1,000 feet from the theater made it all the more horrifying. And sad.
Can you see it? According to this story, The Bridge will air on IFC this fall. Jonestown will be part of the 2006/2007 season of the PBS series American Experience.