Heaven Scent Films
Two decades later, Tomlinson returns to the scene of a groovy gathering.
Details
It Takes a Cult SIFF Cinema: 9:30 p.m. Tues., May 26. Pacific Place: 5 p.m. Thurs., May 28.
Back to the Garden Pacific Place: 7:15 p.m. Mon., June 1 and 5 p.m. Tues., June 3.
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After the peace movement of the '60s, hippies became a tarnished brand, even a scary one. The alternative lifestyle, to outsiders, could resemble a cult. But two new documentaries look back fondly to the hippie heyday, which roughly coincides with SIFF's founding in 1976. The first is It Takes a Cult, made by a former member of the Love Israel Family (aka the Church of Armageddon), which once had some 400 members and extensive real estate holdings on Queen Anne Hill and near Arlington, Wash., before 1980s lawsuits, financial mismanagement, and other charges against its founder led to bankruptcy and dissolution in 2003.
The second is Back to the Garden, which does a 20-year follow-up on eastern Washington hippie homesteaders with a very different model of association. Without a charismatic religious leader or central commune, these off-the-grid utopians have stayed out of the news while clinging to their agrarian ideals. But two decades of subsistence farming can take a toll on those values.
And their adult children, like those of the Love Family, are now reconsidering those ideals, and—contrary to all expectation—are in many cases embracing them. Both films posit a kind of hippie revival: apocalypse then, utopia now.
"Deprogramming," and parents kidnapping back their supposedly brainwashed kids, became a media staple during the '70s, particularly after the Charles Manson murders, Jonestown, and the Moonies' move to Seattle. Included in It Takes a Cult is a startling CBS news segment, narrated by Charles Kuralt, in which an unidentified member of the Love Family is forcibly removed from his Seattle brethren by de-brainwashing specialists hired by his parents. Other grainy news clips show our popular fascination with these free-lovin' Jesus freaks: the men all bearded, the women in demure, traditional garb, the children raised collectively without benefit of birthdays or—in the Family's early years—public education. There are hints of polygamy, and worse. In addition to the local TV coverage, both Seattle dailies and Seattle Weekly (in Roger Downey's Dec. 1, 1982 cover story) wrote extensively on the Love Family. Cults sell newspapers, especially when in 1972 two members of the Love Family fatally overdosed while huffing varnish remover in some kind of religious ceremony.
But that was six years before the birth of It Takes a Cult director Eric Johannsen, known within the Family as On Israel. Now 31, he arrived with his parents at the ranch in Arlington when he was less than a year old.
The wonderful old video and home-movie footage compiled by Johannsen—originally filmed by his father and other Family members—depicts a cheerful hippie paradise for youngsters. Kids ran free among the Love Family's multiple houses, their fences removed. "It was pretty awesome," recalls Johannsen, who lived on Queen Anne and went to the Coe School. But his parents split in the early '80s—around the same time as the Love Family schism. (In brief: Love was accused of enriching himself at the expense of his followers, plus making a series of ill-advised purchases—including a helicopter and a mine sweeper—and real-estate investment blunders.)
Johannsen moved to Illinois with his father (who soon ended his ties to the Family), but returned for college at the UW. After graduation, Johannsen headed to New York and began working on the documentary in 2003, shortly after the Love Family declared bankruptcy. The old Love Family compound on Queen Anne has since been converted into townhouses selling—until the recent recession—for nearly $1 million per unit.
Contrary to what some viewers may want, Johannsen's independently produced and funded documentary isn't a repudiation or exposé of the "cult" in which he was raised. It's more of a cultural artifact than a potential SIFF prizewinner. The great old footage isn't well-organized; few interviewees, or those otherwise filmed, are identified by name. (It doesn't help that the Love Family names are so confusing, or that former members tend to revert back to their birth names.) There's no clear timeline, no delving into the sexual and legal issues that plagued the Family. Love Israel was accused of financial improprieties and polygamous sexual practices (he has 11 children by two women in the Family), but you'd never know it from the film. Johannsen's voice is heard occasionally, but he doesn't provide a narrative framework. He's not an investigative reporter, nor does he pretend to be. Despite the wonderful source material, the film is more like a collage one might make from home movies found in one's parents' attic. But it's a fascinating collage.
In a sense, It Takes a Cult normalizes a bizarre family (or Family) history. Treated as memoir or fiction—hello, James Frey—the material would be dynamite. But Johannsen seems intent on defusing that bomb, making the unconventional conventional.
Both his parents appear and speak in the film, as youngsters and oldsters. "It was all very Beatles," says his mother (whose own parents clearly still disapprove). The Family's religious beliefs remain a mystery: "Now is the time. We are all one. Love is the answer." Which would sound more convincing as a John Lennon lyric.
