mondo cinema and beyond 1960s — 1980s
1955’s Les maîtres fous, a privileged glimpse at the rites of participants in the Hauka movement who, in their meetings, would work themselves into a trance state and enact a grotesque burlesque of the roles played by their British colonial overlords. In Chronique d’un été, filmed over the summer of 1960, Rouch filmed his own circle of acquaintances in Paris, among them Marceline Loridan Ivens, a survivor of Auschwitz then in her early thirties, who had seen firsthand the fruits of civilization.
Chronique d’un été’s interrogation of Parisian culture,
appearing in fall of 1961, came at a moment when eyes were on primitive New Guinea as they had never been before. At that year’s Cannes festival, Pierre Dominique Gaisseau premiered his film Le Ciel et la boue (Sky Above and Mud Beneath); the film, shot over a seven-month stretch the previous year, follows an expedition by Gaisseau and a mixed Franco-Dutch party through the back country of Netherlands New Guinea, and would go on to be the first documentary Oscar winner. Later in ’61, the attention of the American public was seized by the story of 23-year-old Michael Clark Rockefeller, son of New York governor and Museum of Primitive Art founder Nelson Rockefeller, who disappeared off the coast of southwest New Guinea after swimming to shore from an overturned catamaran in the Arafura Sea to seek help. Rockefeller had earlier been acting as sound engineer on the material that would become Robert Gardner’s Dead Birds (completed 1963) in the Great Baliem Valley, and had struck off to study the art of the Asmat tribe and to buy their carved bisj poles, which played a crucial role in the headhunting rites that they then still practiced. Over fifty years later, Carl Hoffman would publish a book with the ever-so-slightly Mondo title Savage Harvest, which posited that Rockefeller had been butchered and eaten in reciprocity for the 1957
neither/nor
13
killing of five tribesman in the village of Otsjanep by a Dutch police force, his thigh bones used for daggers. (Tis word-of-mouth is the only evidence testifying to Rockefeller’s fate, and the Amsat are rivaled only by the white man in their self-aggrandizing boastfulness.)
Elsewhere on the islands of New Guinea, at
approximately the same time that a manhunt was being conducted for the missing scion of the Rockefeller millions, an Italian film crew was at work.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56
