mondo cinema and beyond 1960s — 1980s


beginning its entrenchment, is defined as an “impossible, hysterical defense” by the white ruling class.


In contrast to the condemnatory tone of the narration, the filmmakers rarely fail to strike an elegiac tone when addressing the departure of the colonials, even disproportionately so. In a film brimming with scenes of masses of men and beast in flight, compare the treatment of the Watusi exodus to Uganda to that of the flight of the Boers returning to South Africa from Kenya in covered wagons (!), accompanied by a swelling soundtrack and the orange disc of the sun setting on empire. (Te movie is riddled with sunsets—over the “segregated prison” of Johannesburg, behind the “crumbling stone ramparts” of a Portuguese fortress in Angola, and so on.) Even the white soldiers of fortune at work in the Congo come in for a sort of romanticization—two of the fighter pilots, we are told, are “Ex-Rhodesians whose families were murdered by the Angolan rebels,” presumably staying on to exact revenge any way that they can. Te best that can be said in defense of the film is to say that it suffers from an excess in pity, a compulsion to mourn for anyone, race notwithstanding, who happens to be living on the African continent in the aftermath of independence.


With a staggering body count of both wildlife and


men, Africa Addio contains many more images of violence than any film that Jacopetti and Prosperi had made to date. Te slaughter of wildlife by spear and by rifle is depicted on a staggering scale as the filmmakers ride along with hunters, mercenaries, and soldiers, white and black. One sequence, that of a massive hunt in which, we are told, ten thousand tribesmen have hemmed in “an area the size of Rhode Island” and proceeded to kill every living thing within, is the most overwhelming combination of image and music in the whole of the Jacopetti and Prosperi corpus, a deliriously gory


neither/nor


19


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