In 1979 Scott B and Beth B assembled one of their most unsettling and ethically provocative shorts, Letters to Dad — an 11‑minute Super 8 piece in which downtown No Wave personalities including Pat Place, Arto Lindsay, Vivienne Dick, John Ahearn, Kiki Smith, Tom Otterness and Bill Rice read what at first seem to be intimate messages to a father figure. The Bs then reveal that these are not fictional notes but the actual last letters written by followers of Jim Jones shortly before the 1978 Jonestown mass suicide/murder. The choice to repurpose the private, traumatized words of real victims into a performative downtown art piece was typical of the Bs’ assaultive aesthetic — an intentional provocation that confronted viewers with the raw politics of cult, power and media spectacle. While the film circulated in No Wave exhibition contexts (club screenings and underground programs) rather than mainstream venues, the work has continued to polarize: for some it is a searing commentary on manipulation and the public consumption of tragedy, for others an ethically fraught appropriation of victims’ voices.
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AI concept artworkArchive Record · 1970s
The Provocative 1979 Short 'Letters to Dad' That Recycled Jonestown Victims’ Last Messages
Letters to Dad (Scott B and Beth B) / 1970s
In 1979 Scott B and Beth B assembled one of their most unsettling and ethically provocative shorts, Letters to Dad — an 11‑minute Super 8 piece in which downtown No Wave personalities including Pat Place, Arto Lindsay, Vivienne Dick, John Ahearn, Kiki Smith, Tom Otterness and Bill Rice read what at first seem to be intimate messages to a father figure. The Bs then reveal that these are not fictional notes but the actual last letters written by followers of Jim Jones shortly before the 1978 Jonestown mass suicide/murder. The choice to repurpose the private, traumatized words of real victims into a performative downtown art piece was typical of the Bs’ assaultive aesthetic — an intentional provocation that confronted viewers with the raw politics of cult, power and media spectacle. While the film circulated in No Wave exhibition contexts (club screenings and underground programs) rather than mainstream venues, the work has continued to polarize: for some it is a searing commentary on manipulation and the public consumption of tragedy, for others an ethically fraught appropriation of victims’ voices.
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