neither/nor
opportunity to linger on exposed black flesh—determined at least partly by the subject matter, but also an instance of authorial droit de seigneur. Te plantation is introduced as a Vaseline-lensed fairyland, where a little blonde moppet leads a pet black boy by a length of chain, and the help polish the table silver, recalling the scene of estate holdings being auctioned in Africa Addio.
After scrupulously detailing every indignity that was visited on the African in North America (and a few that might’ve been original concoctions), Jacopetti and Prosperi offer a thirteen-minute postscript set in contemporary Florida. To the tune of a propulsive fuzztone guitar, a young,
defiantly Afroed black 22
man reads a dog-eared copy of William Styron’s Te Confessions of Nat Turner and, surrounded by jolly, oblivious whites at the beach—so like the Cape Town beach-goers in Africa Addio—imagines a present- day version of Turner’s uprising. Tis is visualized in a slow-motion sequence in which leather-jacketed Black Panthers creep under cover of darkness into the home of a family of upper-middle-class whites, hatcheting the parents in their beds, plucking the baby from his cradle and dashing his brains out against the wall, and engaging in a wholesale destruction of commercial goods that is reminiscent of a scene from another Italian filmmaker’s American travelogue, on the opposite end of the lowbrow-highbrow spectrum, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970).
Te potency of the moral outrage that Jacopetti vents
towards Africa’s first generation of strongman leaders in the narration of Africa Addio is slightly blunted when one learns about the circumstances of Goodbye Uncle Tom’s production. In need of a large pool of black extras available to work for low (if not slave) wages, they shot in Haiti, ruled over by dictatorial François “Papa Doc”
mondo cinema and beyond 1960s — 1980s
Duvalier, who was then nearing the end of his term as “president for life.” Te film was made with the complete connivance of the brutal Duvalier regime and, just as they sit down with the mistress of the plantation at its opening, the filmmakers dined with the dictator every Friday. Tat this was happening in the country that had, in 1791, been the scene of the first slave revolt to lead to the foundation of a modern state was the sort of irony that Jacopetti usually cherished. For whatever reason, in Addio Zio Tom he chose to remain mum on the subject.
A work crippled by the inexcusable compromises behind its production, Goodbye Uncle Tom was conceived as an ordeal, and an ordeal it is—a ghastly feature-length degradation ceremony. It is also a cinematic object utterly unlike anything that had existed before or after it. While Django Unchained (2012) and 12 Years a Slave (2013) both, in their own ways, represented the physical facts of slavery, their awards season prestige is sufficient proof that these were films that emerged from a massively different social context. In the years before ABC-TV’s airing of Roots (1977), certain American films that were cheap and disreputable enough to be able to afford the risk had begun to address to the “peculiar institution” that helped to build the nation—the blaxploitation western Te Legend of Nigger Charley (1972), for example—but for the most part, studio pictures had swept the whole affair under the rug. You have to go to 1930’s Abraham Lincoln to find an appropriately harrowing image of the Middle Passage, filmed by Griffith, the architect of Klan- recruitment tool Birth of a Nation (1915). Goodbye Uncle Tom not only buffaloes past all considerations of tact and taste that would have constrained native North American filmmakers, but it is a perfect distillation of the modus operandi that runs through Jacopetti and Prosperi’s work: to interrogate the concept of civilization and to expose the barbarity that props up the civilized facade.
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