mondo cinema and beyond 1960s — 1980s
Goodbye Uncle Tom, though made with great formal
control, is reckless film, a film that evokes gut-level responses, uncorks passions without attempting to assuage. You can easily imagine fist fights breaking out during its original release, and today, where the movie is posted on YouTube, the comments sections are litanies of outrage and vented venom: “ya can go ahead and hold hands with these white demons,” “Movie made Roots look like the Waltons. Had so many mixed emotions from watching this. Eye opener. Watch if u dare,” “fuck the muslims, who let this all
happen.....they sold them to the whiteys for white girls and gold...,” and so on. I have found the film re-edited to a speech on “Te Effeminization of the Black Male,” debated on hip-hop forums, and referenced at the white power message board
Stormfront.org (“filmed in Haiti by Jews, again for the purpose of inciting racial hatred against innocent white people,” writes “Proud Anglo-Saxon.”) Unlike other contemporary taboo-smashers, it has lost none of its power to affront, all the more so because in endeavoring to depict the nuts-and-bolts economics of slavery in the antebellum era, it took advantage of white economic privilege circa 1971. It is, simply put, the most unsparing depiction of slavery in the New World that has ever been produced or likely ever will be produced, almost Boschian in its horrors. For this reason if for no other, it is a vital work in the history of screening race in America, too awful and vital to be walled off behind the label of “forbidden knowledge.”
Jacopetti and Prosperi’s last film together, and Jacopetti’s last film as a director, would be a 1975 adaptation of Candide, ou L’Optisme (1759). Te film’s title, foisted on them by producers in order to forge a connection with past successes, was Mondo candido, though with it they dropped all pretext of documentary style, retelling the story of Voltaire’s picaresque hero
neither/nor
confronted with a fallen world. Te choice of text is significant for what it says of the filmmakers’ image of themselves, as satirists concerned with the relationship between so-called savages and civilized man. Tey were not, perhaps, the ideal chroniclers of Africa in its post- independence moment or of North American slavery, but they are the chroniclers that we have, the artists— and I call them artists, for in the vigor of their film language if not their scruples, they were often brilliant— who were willing to go where others would not.
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