mondo cinema and beyond 1960s — 1980s


beneath the delirium invoked by their style there is a cogent worldview, both playful and pessimistic.


Goodbye Uncle Tom was meant as a rebuke to the charges of racism that dogged Jacopetti and Prosperi after Africa Addio, a mea culpa along the lines of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), although the film emerged with the tone-deafness and all-encompassing scorn that was the duo’s trademark. Te idea was apparently hatched by Prosperi, who suggested, “Why don’t we do Mandingo as a documentary?” Te reference is to a 1957 novel by Kyle Onstott depicting the workaday obscenity of life on an antebellum plantation, later filmed by Richard Fleischer and released in 1975. Per a narration that appears early in Jacopetti and Prosperi’s finished product, Goodbye Uncle Tom would transport the viewer back to “once upon a time, when the peculiar economy of the south, the morals of the times, certain scientific beliefs, and even various passages of the Bible authorized the white man to relegate the black to the existence of a domestic animal, without intelligence, without a soul.” It was to be the first period- piece documentary, which to most minds would mean it wasn’t a doc at all, but the huckster historian directors had never been ones to get hung up on such details.


As Goodbye Uncle Tom begins, the filmmakers pass


over the Louisiana swamps in their preferred method of transport, helicopter, blowing away fresh-picked cotton as they touch down on the rolled greensward in the front of the house, billowing the taffeta dresses of the ladies. Tis is followed by a point-of-view dinner table set piece in which Jacopetti and Prosperi (off-camera) are greeted by such luminaries as Virginia congressman John Randolph and, visiting from New England, hatchet- faced bluestocking Harriet Beecher Stowe, who decides then and there to write a book called Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Tis scene is only slightly less elaborately shot than


neither/nor


that of the dinner with the vestigial French colonists in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979)—and it is worth noting that before Citizen Kane (1941), a young Orson Welles had planned for his debut film to be an all POV adaptation of the same novel which had inspired Coppola’s film, Heart of Darkness.


From here we are treated to a step-by-step reenactment of the journey of newly arrived slaves from Middle Passage to quarantine—a “Fort Bastille” which, with its giant slides, is something like an insidious amusement park—to auction block and plantation, accompanied by an Ortolani theme whose martial pomp adds an air of sarcastic jollity to the dreadful proceedings. Slaves with diarrhea are treated with sugar cane plugs; one slave on hunger strike gets his teeth hammered out so he can be fed with a funnel, like one of the geese being fattened for fois gras in Mondo Cane. Te atmosphere is one of absolute and all-encompassing iniquity. Te whites who direct- address the camera are a collection of greasy louts, rapists, and sadists familiar from spaghetti Western villainy: Tere’s the “veterinarian” who oversees the inspection of the incoming slaves, wearing mummy-like gauze around his face to cover up his erythema, and the flabby, shirtless German slave trader who holds court on the financial arithmetic of his calling. If the incoming black Africans were possessed of some innate human dignity, any trace of it has been thoroughly effaced by the time that they’ve arrived in their new home—they giggle like children during their forced enemas, and delight in the humiliation of the uppity among their number. (Ashley Clark, writing of the film recently in the pages of Sight & Sound as a species of science fiction, notes that it is “extremely harsh on bourgeois blacks,” and that in it “Martin Luther King is fingered as the ultimate ‘Uncle Tom.’”) At the very least the bodies of the slaves are more photogenic than those of their new masters, and the camera squanders no


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