What can you say about a movie that features close ups of the dead unborn offspring of both elephants and hippos, freshly ripped from their mothers' slaughtered carcasses and still covered in womb juice? Or 10 minutes of nubile teenagers frozen in slo mo mid air joy jumps? Oh yeah, or the two men who are executed? And all in the name of reality.
For three years, Mondo filmmakers Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi ran around Africa during an incredibly volatile period of de-colonizing and came home with a documentary featuring genocide, constant animal slaughter (by poachers and natives alike), and specious philosophizing about the unruly continent. For their (nearly fatal) efforts they were branded racists, frauds, and, in the case of Jacopetti, murderers (a charge of which he was tried and acquitted). From a suitably boring amount of internet research I still haven't cleared up all the controversy. The directors still maintain the absolute veracity of every single scene, but critics claim that certain animal hunts-though involving real killing-were organized by the filmmakers, etc. etc.
Viewers weened on too much online hype and speculatory buggery might go into this film imaging some kind of rangled together, herky jerky bit of exploito docu porno ala the contempo visual style developed in COPS, polished in Saving Private Ryan et al. and currently present in every reality television show and action movie one can wave a puke-swabbed middle finger at. The rapacious nose of the current camera and its giddy intrusiveness inform most all visual culture (whether cyber or Hollywoodland) and our present understanding that the intimacy of surgical voyeurism necessitates a lot of FX-textured gore and a camera man up to his sinuses in bad coke.
Not so Jacopetti and Prosperi (or rather amazing cinematographer Antonio Climati). While you might get a case of the spins watching today's reality exploitation, Addio does desensitization ten times better by clearly and steadily freezing their victims in a pre-video game pure cinematic eye. The consequence is consistently GRAND ICONIC imagery. And there's not a wasted frame in the whole miserable spectacle. Many, if not most of the best images simply command complete awe. The effect is utterly mesmerizing and captivating in its seductive objectivity. We don't know what kind of manipulation is going on behind the scenes, but we can't deny what we're seeing.
This is not to imply Adio doesn't have a self-consciousness in its imagery or that there isn't quite a bit of cheese. Frequent extravagancies of style contribute to the double-edged effect of the film. For every perfect widescreen long take that focuses us squarely on some savanna antelope riddled with hunters spears and gasping for breath, there's a dizzyingly instantaneous zoom-out (1) waiting to happen. The film in fact is coated in style from its artful framing to its bombastic, schmaltzy score (2). It's so enthusiastically composed and so consistently styled that it largely looks more like Hollywood epic than documentary.
And so it is spectacular in the extreme. Its lack of intimacy or psychology, and emphasis on shear movement of masses of populations (human and animal, largely against one another) imagines a world of senseless power games and empty action. The constant fascination with violent death contrasted with moments of incredibly juvenile humor throw us further into awkward ambivalence, where sympathy is undercut by cynical condescension.
I can't say if, despite its refusal to 'properly' contextualize its sensational material, this atrocious and meticulously vile film accurately captures the terror and irrationality of Africa during this tumultuous period in some twisted way or another. But the directors really did live the hell they show (for 3 years apparently). And for all the criticism leveled at their questionably muddled politics, the moral quandaries elicited by all the nasty distancing produced by the filmmakers' narrative-visual approach are surely born out of the fact that perhaps, the filmmakers just got too close.
Purveyors of Mondo Macabro's every release might complain that I'm just over thinking schlock, but this is really in an entirely different league than some minor Sergio Martino flick. I could write a whole book on this shit.
But I won't.
Anyway, worth a look! And then some kind of colon-cleansing detoxification for the soul. Cheer up!
1. While the constant zoom-out shots are a bit goofy, they do heighten the de-personalization and complete rejection of character that are Jacopetti's and Prosperi's stock in trade. Frequently individuals are filmed in extreme close-up and then promptly zoomed-out upon to reveal their total anonymity in some massive crowd. A smattering of crushed egg shells are treated the same way at one point.
2. Which is curiously reminiscent of the main theme to Henry Hathaway's kinda classic western The Sons of Katie Elder from the previous year.
P.S. This turned out to be such an anti-matter bum trip that I actually agreed to go to a movie theater in a mall last night with my girlfriend to see Persepolis as an antidote. Turns out, that movie's a bit of a downer as well. So I'm listening to a couple hours of old Gunsmoke episodes on CD (that's right the radio program, not the boring TV show) this afternoon to try and feel human again.
P.P.S. I was working on a long revisionist sorta take on Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo (starring yours truly) and using all kind of metaphors like how the jail is like a virginal womb or how the door Stumpy is always guarding is an anus and all of Berdette's men are like faceless homosexual rapists feared by Sheriff John T Chance's band of repressed reactionaries. But as much as I believe that the film is loaded with interesting sexual subtext, I realized that there was no way I could make all this shit readable or amusing and it started to feel like a college assignment anyway. So count yourselves lucky, lest I try to academically eviscerate some other treasured childhood heirloom at some point in the future. There was going to be one clever thing about it though, and that was this image to lead the piece off:
