neither/nor


Gesamtkunstwerk. Other of the film’s sequences, such as helicopter views of massacred Arabs in Zanzibar, seem too tidily staged for this viewer to accept outright—the thwabs of the dead are crisp, white, and unsullied, their bodies carefully arrayed and evenly spaced—although Chicago Sun-Times reviewer Roger Ebert singles out this very scene as authentic beyond question.


20


Ultimately, the only assurance that the viewer has of the credibility of what they are seeing is their own intuition and what testimony has come down to us from those who were present at the shoot. Jacopetti, for his part, only admitted in his lifetime to faking one scene, a Buddhist monk’s self-immolation in Mondo Cane 2 reproducing Malcolm Browne’s famous photo, achieved through the use of a dummy designed by special effects expert Carlo Rambaldi. In the case of Africa Addio, some of the footage is undeniably genuine, including the summary execution of Congolese Simba rebels, although this raises some of the same questions as the stray dog sacrificed for the camera in Mondo Cane: Would this have happened at all without the complicity of the filmmakers? Were they, to borrow terminology that Bateson and Mead would’ve used, entering the realm of the participant-observer? Carlo Gregoretti, reporting on a visit to the shoot in the December 20, 1964, edition of L’Espresso ( Jacopetti’s old masthead!), described a damning contract between triggermen and cameraman, with mercenary Ben Louw waiting to open fire on three young, unarmed rebels until Climati had framed his shot. (“Te Arriflex rolled together with the machine gun mechanism,” he wrote, “and the three rebel boys fell to the road.”)


Ebert, reviewing the film that was released in the United States as Africa Blood and Guts—this version was re-edited and somewhat truncated, though it is


mondo cinema and beyond 1960s — 1980s


doubtful that the original would have evoked a different response—accuses the filmmakers of collusion with poachers, and calls their work “a brutal, dishonest, racist film,” continuing, “One would not, of course, object to a dispassionate study of Africa’s setbacks since independence. But one would expect an examination of its progress, as well.” Years later Jacopetti, speaking in the 2003 documentary Te Godfathers of Mondo, would offer a defense of his film, which he stated was “not a justification for colonialism, but... a condemnation for leaving the continent in miserable condition.” To ask for a “dispassionate study” from Jacopetti and Prosperi is like asking for a frothy musical from Robert Bresson—it runs counter to their authorial personality and practice. Teir leering camera eye lends a funhouse distortion to everything that it lands on, and if there are moments in Africa Addio that don’t meet even the most relaxed standards of cultural sensitivity, it needs be said that its authors saw the agonizing growing pains that lay ahead for independent Africa as few others did.


Mirroring Gregoretti in L’Espresso, Ebert goes on to accuse that the material has been “staged for our amusement.” While I would argue that just as often it is staged for our horror, the operative word is “staged,” and this gets at the basic conundrum of Jacopetti and Prosperi’s work and several central questions in documentary ethics: How much disclosure of their methods do doc filmmakers owe to their audiences, and what degree of directorial intervention is conscionable in the interest of shaping the raw material of life to communicate a greater truth? From the obviously staged and choreographed vignettes in Mondo Cane to the application of the documentary template to historical reenactment in Addio Zio Tom (Goodbye Uncle Tom), Jacopetti and Prosperi are never precisely reliable narrators—but they are virtuoso filmmakers, and


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