Gualtiero Jacopetti (1919-2011)

This blog is named for two Italian movies. The "70" comes from the epic portmanteau film Boccaccio 70. The "Mondo" comes from Mondo Cane ("Dog's World"), a global sensation of the 1960s that set the tone for "shockumentaries" without actually inventing the genre. Mondo movies are distinguished, at their best, by an ambitious global sweep framed by expansive cinematography, a mordant or cynically chiding narrative sensibility that deplores the miseries and mocks the follies on display while maximizing their sensation value, and the opulent music, romantic and opulent at once, of Riz Ortolani. Created in collaboration with many hands, Franco Prosperi most importantly, Mondo Cane expressed above all the vision of Gualtiero Jacopetti, who died yesterday at the approximate age of 92. Jacopetti and Prosperi pushed beyond the anecdotal Mondo format to create two staggering and fearsome films: Africa Addio, a vividly violent chronicle of the aftermath of colonialism, and Goodbye Uncle Tom, an incendiary inquiry into the roots of racial unrest in America. Condemned in their time as exploitative, complicit, counterfeit, irresponsible and outright racist, these features and the work of Jacopetti overall arguably exerted an important influence on more respectable filmmakers. They pointed the way toward full-scale feature filmmaking that at once transcended the conventions of literary narrative and the bare reportage of conventional documentary film. Think of them as essay films, for good or ill, expressing an auteur's interpretation of the world around him. In more sensitive hands, the same approach results in films like Fellini Roma from a fellow Italian, F for Fake from Orson Welles, and so on. The Mondo films are milestones of the vulgar avant-garde, spectacular examples for the future and as liberating in their potential as the experiments of Jean-Luc Godard. If cinema is something other than literature and theater, Jacopetti should loom as a giant -- or, if you prefer, a monster -- in the medium's historical landscape, for broadening our horizon of cinema's potential.

Farewell to GOODBYE UNCLE TOM

One more post and I should have this strange film out of my system, to the likely relief of readers everywhere. The big question about Jacopetti & Prosperi's American epic, of course, is whether the film designed to prove that they weren't racists was, in fact, racist. For many viewers, its salacious gaze at the collective humiliation of a race can't help but be racist; it fails all conventional sensitivity tests, after all, and the objects of the filmmakers' solicitous concern can be excused for feeling that the film rather rubs their noses in it. Nevertheless, J&P say that they wanted to make a different impression, though they also admit failing at it. Taking them at their word, can we figure out what they thought they were saying?

Depravity: A slave is about to be castrated for the unauthorized deflowering of virgins. The American cut enhances this scene by having the kid with the tool chant, "Cut! Cut! Cut!"

Bearing in mind that the Director's Cut has a present-day political agenda of explaining the failures of Black Power uprisings in the late 1960s, both that and the American cut, which is stripped of most present-day context, also have something to say about slavery itself. The scenes at the slavery processing plant at Fort Bastille implicitly equate slavery with the modern assembly line, with the slave as the end product instead of a Model T Ford. Slaves are rushed from station to station for cleaning, grooming and feeding. At one point they're sent down a slide in the most obvious assembly-line metaphor. J&P are never explicit about this, but they appear to be saying that the industrialization of slave-processing contributed to a dehumanizing of the enslaved, their metamorphosis into parts on a conveyor belt. Throughout the film, this implicit thesis that the institution of slavery degraded Africans comes up against imagery that (perhaps) unintentionally encourages a belief that Africans were innately degraded, and hence easily adaptable to slavery.

In the second half of the film, the "traveling photographers" visit Dr. Samuel Cartwright, a racist scientist determined to prove that Africans are a separate species from humans. Among his caged slaves are a handful of American Indians who sit or stand in sullen silence. Cartwright explains that Indians are useless for slavery and can't be made to breed in captivity. The difference between blacks and Indians, he says, is like the difference between a dog and a coyote. You can beat a dog all the time, he elaborates, but he'll still lick your shoes, while the coyote, like the Indian, would rather die than live in captivity.

The words are put in the mouth of an odious crank, but as is consistent with the strategy of Addio Zio Tom they go unrefuted, and they leave a question hanging in the air. Were blacks incapable of even the passive resistance of willing themselves to die rather than endure slavery? Were they all too ready to adapt to their degraded condition by making themselves even more abject? Jacopetti and Prosperi took a risk in expecting that the historic racists would damn themselves with commentary that should have been obviously wrong to the modern movie audience. They felt no need to have someone in the film, even themselves as the time travellers, actively challenge the racist assertions of the 19th century. The only time they really go after a character in the film is when (in the American cut) they meet an educated slave who considers himself better off than the working-class poor. They express no comparable indignation to their white hosts. Since I get their point, I can agree with the idea that the shouldn't have had to go constantly through the film yelling, "this is wrong!" But something is unmistakably missing from either version of Tom that could have grounded the audience in a way that might have assured the correct response to the racist opinions expressed in the film. Simply put, while the Italian version is very much concerned with the "after" side of the story that plays out in the modern day, neither version is concerned with "before." In other words, Tom doesn't tell us what Africans were like before they were enslaved, and thus forces viewers to grapple with the either-way-loaded question of whether blacks were depraved by slavery or inherently depraved. There is no default state shown of free Africans in their native culture, and this is a fatal omission for the film's documentary ambitions. If J&P wanted to argue that American blacks were somehow changed for the worse by slavery, they needed to give us some idea of what they might have changed from. By their omission they left themselves vulnerable to the charge of racism since their cinematic argument had not effectively excluded the possibility of innate depravity as an explanation for the sordid spectacles presented.

Part of the problem may have been conceptual and tied to the "Addio" theme that links the film with Africa Addio, the movie for which Tom is allegedly an apology. "Africa Addio" refers both to the European imperialists' farewell to Africa and the disappearance of a certain European idea of Africa as Africans attempted to enter the modern world on their own terms. "Addio Zio Tom," in turn, refers as much to the extinction of the "Uncle Tom" archetype as it does to the end of slavery and its consequences. This is made clear in the prologue to the Director's Cut, in which Black Power radicals use "Uncle Tom" as a pejorative accommodationist blacks, while an elderly Southern matron retains a chauffeur who bears the infamous name. Wandering amid plantation ruins on her property, she babbles on about how much has remained the same while much has changed, as Tom smokes contemptuously nearby.

The literary Uncle Tom, as some may recall, was a character who resisted evil but refused violence, preferring to die rather than compromise his Christian principles. Sixties radicals rejected this proto-Gandhian archetype, preferring to fight, kill and live. Jacopetti and Prosperi's judgment seems to be that the radical stance was a surrender to hate, a tit-for-tat form of racism, and a fantasy of revenge.

All of this is embodied in the anonymous, clerical-looking man we find in the present day struggling to concentrate on the more violent chapters of William Styron's novel The Confessions of Nat Turner. A controversial best-seller and prize-winner in its day, Confessions anticipated the scandal of Goodbye Uncle Tom by a few years as black and leftist critics questioned a white novelist's ability and right to get inside the head of a rebel slave, especially when Styron gave Turner's rebellion a sexual context. In all likelihood Jacopetti & Prosperi were aware of the controversy. For all I know they may have wanted to do a full-scale adaptation of Styron at some point. I do know from the Godfathers of Mondo documentary that one of their inspirations for Tom was, of all things, the novel Mandingo, which awaited adaptation by other hands a few years later.

The Confessions of Nat Turner seems to have influenced Tom's thesis that the intimate, perhaps inevitably sexualized milieu of slavery provoked thwarted desires in black men that played out, on rare occasions, in violent outbreaks of revenge against masters. The reader in Tom translates scenes from Turner into wild fantasies of modern murder raids on white families that segue into assaults on consumer goods possibly modeled on the explosive finale of Zabriskie Point. This is J&P's somewhat unsubtle way of saying that Black Power is no different from Nat Turner's purported pathology. Consciously associating themselves with Styron (whether Styron might have liked the idea or not) was only asking for trouble from an audience already inclined to conclude that any white men who imagined black men having violent thoughts had to be racists. Maybe this was the cynicism so often attributed to Jacopetti coming through, since the controversy surrounding Styron probably sold more books and may have seemed like a model for marketing a successfully controversial film. But whether the filmmakers' motivations were cynical or sincere, releasing Tom when they did was a catastrophic miscalculation.

One more difference between versions: In the Director's Cut, this scene comes when the traveling photographers leave the Old South in their helicopter. In the American cut, it plays during the pre-credits sequence as they arrive.

For some people, the only way for Jacopetti & Prosperi to absolve themselves of racism would have been to show blacks in a constant state of heroic resistance to slavery. That would have gone against their apparent conviction that slavery was as they showed it in Tom, and their rule was to call things as they saw them. Is it possible that a refusal to indulge in idealization is a form of racism, or that a willingness to idealize humanity as a whole is a prerequisite for democracy itself? I suppose those aren't questions for a movie blog, but it's a way of getting to the point that, due to sins of omission and commission, despite their best intentions, Goodbye Uncle Tom will never fully shake the charge of racism. And if the filmmakers' intent was to be positively provocative, maybe that isn't necessarily a bad thing. It is definitely a testimony to the enduring visionary and emotional power of one of history's most provocative films.

Sexploitation and Slavery in GOODBYE UNCLE TOM

When the Italian filmmakers Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi visited a Southern plantation sometime in the early 1850s, their plan to conduct an inquiry into the peculiar institution of slavery was met with polite skepticism from their hosts and various other guests. While an envious Harriet Beecher Stowe decided on the spot to write Uncle Tom's Cabin in order to scoop the strangers from the flying machine, others at the dinner table questioned the researchers' motives. Noting that they were Italian and Catholic, one man opined that the visitors were slaves of a sort themselves -- "slaves to the fascination of sin."

Of course, this was but a hint of self-awareness if not self-criticism on the part of the infamous duo, not to mention a warning of their methodology in the making of Goodbye Uncle Tom. Tom is meant to be an anti-racist film in order to make up for misinterpretations of their African documentary. As Quentin Tarantino might put it, their way of answering critics amounted to putting out fires with gasoline. Their challenge was complicated by a more persistent charge against them: that their affectations of seriousness only masked a sleazy cynicism that approached its subject matter in a spirit of exploitation. Their films from Mondo Cane forward were called "shockumentaries," not documentaries, as if sensationalism belied any claims of serious purpose on the part of J&P.

In The Godfathers of Mondo Franco Prosperi says that "violence is another form of objectivity." You can see what he means: violence is a necessary component of showing the world as it is, or at least as he and Jacopetti see it. But can violence be viewed as objectively as Prosperi wants? In their own script for Tom, that crack about "the fascination of sin" hints at how the choice to show violence or other sins might betray a lack of objectivity on the part of the filmmakers. And if the fascination of sin influences their pictorial and editorial choices, what will the audience make of it all? I've described Tom as an attempt to show compassion toward the victims of slavery. But someone might well question whether it's compassionate to stare at someone's absolute subjugation and humiliation -- or to have people re-enact the subjugation and humiliation of their ancestors. After all, as some racists believe, the Bible relates that Noah cursed Ham and his son Canaan, turning their descendants black, because Ham stared at Noah's drunken nakedness. Jacopetti & Prosperi's reading of scripture raises the stakes even further. They have a white preacher state that Ham and Canaan were cursed for castrating Noah. This may have been another, even more subconscious warning to the audience about the implications of what they would see in Tom.

The American cut of Goodbye Uncle Tom is supposed to be toned down from the Italian original (or its modern incarnation as the 2003 Director's Cut), but that toning down turns out to be no more than a dumbing down of the film's present-day political context. The American cut is at several points more violent than the Director's Cut, for instance, and it retains most of the Italian version's sex scenes. The one exception is significant, as is the fact that the scenes that stayed are rape scenes. One has a gang of four poor white "Crackers" invading a slave compound and raping several women. The other has a teenage "mare" delivered to Jason, the imbecilic prize stud of a slave-breeding farm.

Both scenes are brutally filmed but scored to disturbing counterpunctual effect by Riz Ortolani with soaringly romantic yet more insistently percussive variations on the movie's theme song. Ortolani is a master of this kind of counterpoint, as he'd show again with the pastoral lyricism of Cannibal Holocaust. The intent of composer and filmmakers alike is to convey idealism under physical assault, but the effect is not necessarily unlike a more conventional sex scene scored to build toward a climax. It's understandable if critics wonder whether J&P want to have it both ways, outraging and infuriating some viewers but titillating and arousing others. But I doubt whether anyone has ever admitted being aroused by these scenes from Tom. However, if they presume that others will be titillated, isn't their only evidence their own feelings? Beware "the fascination with sin"...

More problematic yet is the sex scene left out of the American cut. In the Director's Cut, a wax museum proprietor relates the legend of Madame La Laurie and her companion Caesar, who purchased slaves for the purpose of stocking a unisex harem of opium addicts upon whom the devious pair could play out all their perverse whims. Caesar tends to go overboard with them sometimes the way Lennie does with mice, while the Madame practices a more refined sensuality. Here she is almost literally swimming in an undulating pool of black flesh, in a scene more insistently, indisputably erotic than the rape scenes.

But look out! All of a sudden it's Bathory time, and out come the pliers. I don't know if this legendary personage made as much use of precious bodily fluids as her Euro counterparts, but what we see is bad enough. It's as if this time J&P dared you to be aroused by the waves of nudity they present, only to throw the pliers at your head. There's an evil sensuality on display in Tom, not so much because sensuality is evil but because evil has a sensuality of its own.

The sensuality and sexuality is an important part of the story of slavery as told by Jacopetti & Prosperi. Slavery as practiced on the plantations had an inevitably sexual aspect because of the intimacy shared by slaves and masters. Tom makes the controversial and perhaps unacceptable suggestion that sex was not only a way for masters to dominate slaves, but also a way for slaves to negotiate their standing with masters. We see a heavy-footed Mammy castigating a girl for going to bed with Massa while still a virgin, and a supposed 13 year old girl urging the man behind the camera (in the Director's Cut this is supposed to be a historical person relating an actual experience, but in the American version it may be one of our time-travelling narrators) to take her maidenhead. She helpfully offers the man a whip in case he needs that to get into the right frame of mind.

At the slave market the diminutive General, whip in hand like a ringmaster, takes us on a tour of the seamier side of human commerce. In separate compartments slave girls learn to dance sensuously, a flaming white man body-paints twin pairs of boys for the trade that dare not speak its name, and the piece de resistance stands stoically like a cartoon ghost under a sheet. What's so special about this guy? "He's got three!" the General explains gleefully, "One, two, three!" The thrice-endowed individual himself has the self-respect to put his hands in front of the camera before the "three what?" question is answered.

Do you see a problem here? J&P claim that they want us to sympathize with the plight of the slaves, but our initial assumption of sympathy often depends on a further assumption that the slaves desire freedom. But what we see more often than not is accommodation, behaviors that begin to look like self-degradation rather than survival strategies. Think about it a little and you may realize that the filmmakers are trying to say that all of this is forced on the slaves, that it's a consequence of slavery rather than proof of their suitability for slavery, as the whites take it to be. But Tom's argument that slavery degraded blacks while fueling a simmering shame-based hatred for whites that limited their political imagination is itself, however well-intended, unacceptable for many American viewers. We want to believe in an unassailable dignity and perseverance that could only have been expressed in the sort of perpetual resistance that J&P do not show. If the filmmakers don't give these traits to the slaves, it makes people think that J&P do think slaves are subhuman. Worse yet, there's one scene that I haven't discussed yet that does seem, in some way, to blame blacks for their own degradation, but I want to save that for the next post, in which I try to determine whether Tom is, in fact, a racist film.

The Two Versions of GOODBYE UNCLE TOM

In my last post on the subject I equated Jacopetti & Prosperi's Mondo apocalypse on American themes with The Birth of A Nation. As far as they were concerned, however, it was their Intolerance, an answer to critics of their previous documentary, Africa Addio. When that film was released in 1966, the filmmakers were accused of having executions staged for their cameras, but what really stung was the charge of racism against Africans. Africa Addio is a survey of the changes underway in the title continent, with too much emphasis on civil war and atrocities for many people's tastes. The argument was that Europe had withdrawn from Africa too soon, leaving Africans unprepared for self-rule. Critics interpreted this as if J&P had said Africans were incapable of self-rule, and no more than savages. Jacopetti resented the charge, and thought that a compassionate account of the ordeal of slavery suffered by Africans would prove the critics wrong. How naive.

In the Godfathers of Mondo documentary included with Blue Underground's historic Mondo Cane Collection, Jacopetti deems Goodbye Uncle Tom a failure, since it left many viewers only more convinced that he and Prosperi were racists. If the viewers didn't get the point, he concludes, that's his fault, not theirs. This is an unusually generous attitude for a controversial filmmaker, but it begs a question: what didn't audiences get? Is the argument of Goodbye Uncle Tom nothing more than "We're not racists?" There are more economical ways to make that point, but when you consider the actual film you realize that J&P are trying to say something else -- and what that is depends on the version of the film you watch.

As Blue Underground puts it, the original version of Addio Zio Tom "was an experience so incendiary that distributors forced the filmmakers to completely re-cut the film and radically re-write its extreme narration, removing more than 13 minutes of race-war politics and inserting alternate scenes -- creating what would become an entirely different film -- before it could be released!"

Today, we have at least two versions of the film: the American cut and what Blue Underground bills as a "Director's Cut" restored by Jacopetti, "presented uncut and uncensored for the first time anywhere in the world." This implies that the version that played in Europe, which we might otherwise deem the original release version, is not the same as the Director's Cut. How it differs from the final Jacopetti version and the American version remains a mystery. But we can compare the Director's Cut (hereafter Zio) and the American cut (hereafter Uncle), the latter being the version I saw on videotape a decade ago, but spruced up for DVD by Blue Underground. They are profoundly different from one another, but I wouldn't exactly define the American cut as toned down. Dumbed down, maybe, but it's still an incendiary film.

Zio is 136 minutes long, Uncle 123. The difference is accounted for only partly by subtraction. What's subtracted is almost all present-day footage, which in Zio is spread throughout the film. Uncle preserves only the most controversial and inflammatory part of this footage, the fantasy sequence inspired by William Styron's controversial novel The Confessions of Nat Turner, which I'll discuss further in a later post. In one instance, Uncle presents some of the present-day footage, shots of Civil War re-enacters, as if it were actually portraying the Civil War. The other major footage from Zio missing from Uncle is the sleazyrotic Madame La Laurie sequence, which we'll examine more closely in a post on the (s)exploitation aspects of both films.

Uncle shows men playing at war, but Zio shows them picking up their toys and going home.

Zio is structured more like a mondo movie than Uncle. The American cut drops us right into the phantasmagoric premise of the film, that Jacopetti & Prosperi are able to travel back in time in a helicopter to the Old South and see for themselves how slavery worked. Zio actually attempts, in a joking way, to explain this at the end of a prologue that establishes what else they intend to explain. Zio opens with footage of Martin Luther King's funeral, perhaps filmed by J&P's own team given the great picture quality compared to news footage that appears later. They include an unusually moving shot of automobiles going about their business in complete indifference to the massive procession going on behind them, as if to assert an ultimate insignificance of the mournful demonstration.

Riot footage follows, along with quotes from radical Black Power leaders calling for violence. The filmmakers argue that the proposed or hoped-for uprising was a dismal failure, with whites suffering little damage from black rage. It becomes clear that Zio is meant, in part, to explain by reference to the slavery experience why the black uprisings failed and how the heritage of slavery remains a handicap for American blacks. The prologue closes with a protest at Cape Canaveral during a moon shot, as the narrator invokes Einstein's relativity theory to suggest that a journey into the future can actually take us back to the past, and the film proper begins.

Zio returns to the present frequently for mondo-style actualities (i.e., very possibly staged) showing different aspects of modern race relations, ranging from a hippie repentance ritual on top of a Manhattan skyscraper to rampant race and gender mixing during Mardi Gras in New Orleans. The narrators return often to the concept of "Negro-ness" (the subtitle substitute for what used to be called negritude) as a wrong direction for blacks to take. As if pre-empting criticism of their own humiliating treatment of black extras, the filmmakers show Old South re-enactment tours in which blacks are paid to pretend to be slaves.

The final present-day scenes, apart from the Nat Turner fantasy, show an anonymous black leader riding through a ghetto in a police car, telling the hood that repaying race hatred with race hatred (the filmmakers' reading of "Negro-ness") is not the way for blacks to solve the race problem. In retrospect, the slavery footage in Zio seems intended to establish a purely racial grudge that explains a lack of genuine radicalism on the part of the Black Power movement. That footage also allows for a different explanation of ineffective protests, but I'll defer that discussion to another post.

Uncle leaves the Nat Turner fantasy as the only present-day response to the slavery experience. Let me stress again against charges that Uncle is toned down that the Turner footage is the most inflammatory part of the film because (in Uncle especially) it portrays the random slaughter of white families as the black response to slavery. In fact, the American cut of the Turner section goes further than Jacopetti now wants to. In his Director's Cut, he cuts at the last possible moment from the scene of a black radical about to dash a baby against a bedroom wall to a shot of a live baby at the beach. The American cut lets the baby-bashing scene last a few seconds longer.

Uncle (below) boldly goes forward where Zio hesitates at the brink of infanticide.

In at least one counter-instance, Uncle tones down a scene from Zio. A violent action sequence portraying a hunt for fugitive slaves ends in the Director's Cut with the slave hunters posing for a photo beside a mound of dead bodies. Uncle lets the scene run a few moments longer for a comic coda: the slaves in the photo are only playing dead so the hunters can get a good picture. The shot made, they're ordered to scatter.

These are two small instances in which Uncle has footage missing from Zio. There are many more substantial additions to the American cut. I'll close this installment out by listing the most important bits unique to Uncle.

The "flashback" Civil War footage (i.e. the present-day re-enactment footage from Zio) is followed by a scene of slaves burying the dead, followed by an aerial shot of a cemetery, while the Italian-accented narrator explains that "for every negro brought from Africa, a white man fell in battle." The commentary that follows is the part of the American script most clearly designed to exculpate the U.S. from special moral responsibility for slavery, as the narrator states that the nation went on to liberate most of the world from slavery, "an institution America had not invented, but had inherited and endured."

To the assembly-line footage of slavery processing at Fort Bastille is added a visit to the "Veterinary" office, where the bizarrely bandaged Doc White presides over inspections for genital infections and mass enemas.

A nearly idyllic stop by a river during the inland slave march is made more sinister by the burial of a dead baby, the convulsions of sick slaves, and the abrupt murder of fellow slave trader Charlie Wilson by the "benevolent" Mr. Schultz, who warns the narrators off with his pistol to end the scene.

Harriet Beecher Stowe makes a cameo appearance at the plantation first visited by the narrators, announcing her belief in black inferiority but crediting them with "embryonic intelligence" and condemning slavery while declaring her plan to write Uncle Tom's Cabin.

The narrators arrive at the big slave market scene in a wagon decorated with a "Jacopetti & Prosperi Travelling Photographers" sign that for some reason is one of my most vivid memories of my first viewing of the American cut. The filmmakers are more modest in the Director's Cut, cutting their self-advertisement out of the film.

At the slave market, there are three extra scenes. In the first, a white instructor teaches the slaves proper deportment in the presence of whites; they are not to look whites in the eye. "Look at me!" he demands of one of his students, who is slapped for doing so. "Thank you, master," he says. The second is a visit to a dusty insurance office where the narrators learn that individual body parts of slaves can be insured and give the clerk a ballpoint pen. Finally, the narrators encounter an educated slave who gives a speech out of Southern pro-slavery propaganda favorably comparing his situation with that of working-class whites who have no job security and no paternal authorities to look after them. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself!" the narrators tell him, "You're a dishonor to your race!"

The visit with the racist pseudo-scientist Dr. Cartwright is extended with a demonstration of one of his inventions, an anti-masturbation device consisting of a big board the slave can't get his arms around.

Overall, Uncle comes across as something more like Fellini's Satyricon (to the point of Riz Ortolani seeming to ape Nino Rota in some more decadent scenes) than an all-out mondo movie, dropping us in an utterly strange world that's even more alien than we thought it would be. It's less overtly political than Zio but is inescapably political because of its subject matter, though its only contemporary relevance, in its own imagination, is its ability to provoke murderous thoughts in certain black people. Whether blacks come off better in Uncle than in Zio, or whether one version is more or less "racist" than another, is a topic for another post. It's enough for now to say that both films pack a visionary wallop with potentially oppressive force, as Jacopetti & Prosperi dare you to look or look away. The American cut is slightly more violent and gory than the Director's Cut, but the sheer conceptual violence of slavery is so omnipresent and overwhelming that the relative use of special effects seems trivial. Choose your poison, some might say, but either way Tom is a one-of-a-kind viewing experience that film buffs can add to their memories like a badge of courage.

Hello to GOODBYE UNCLE TOM (1971)

Of D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation Woodrow Wilson supposedly said it was like "history written with lightning." The magnum opus of Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi could well be described in the same way.

Griffith made his film, in part, in defense of slavery. The makers of Mondo Cane made Addio Zio Tom, in part, to condemn slavery. Yet both Birth of a Nation and Goodbye Uncle Tom have been called racist films. Worse yet, the Italians have been accused of exploiting slavery, even while condemning it. That's a sort of backhanded tribute to the incendiary, provocative power of the film's images. But there's also a kind of instinctual recognition that such a visceral re-enactment of historic atrocity can, maybe must stir up ugly emotions, including titilation as well as indignation. Add to the brew the fact that some of the most horrific scenes were filmed in Haiti with the cooperation of a monstrous tyrant, and people can't be blamed for feeling that there's something wrong with and about this film. And the filmmakers aren't playing innocent, either. They meant the movie as a provocation as well as an explanation -- but what was being explained, and what did they mean to provoke?

Those questions wouldn't be worth asking if Addio Zio Tom wasn't one of the most powerful visual statements ever filmed. I first saw the American edition on a dupey videotape about a decade ago, having never heard of it before, and I was stunned by its epic scope, not to mention the majestic, feverish score by Riz Ortolani. I've now had a chance to see what Jacopetti considers the definitive Italian version of the film, which includes material left out of the American edition and excludes stuff I remember from my first viewing. Since this is Blue Underground's DVD, the imagery is even more powerful.

This is an introduction to a series of posts I'm going to do on one of my favorite movies, one which I rank among the greatest of the 1970s. My approach to Uncle Tom emulates that of Nigel M.'s I Spit On Your Taste blog, where he dissects movies one theme or idea at a time. With Uncle Tom I have a lot of ground to cover: what were Jacopetti & Prosperi trying to say about slavery and its relevance to America in their own time? Were they racist? Were they exploiting the heritage of slavery, and how would we know if they were? Why did they go the extra mile to associate themselves with the controversy over William Styron's novel The Confessions of Nat Turner when they were probably in enough trouble before the final act? What are the differences between the Italian and American editions of the film, and is one more racist or exploitative than the other? There might not be one post per question, but I have a lot to say about this film and it seems advisable to present it in digestible chunks. Numerous posts also allow me to use a lot of screen captures. Just bear in mind that what you'll see here is the tip of an artistic iceberg, or volcano if you prefer.

Now that I've announced my preview, here's the trailer for the international version (known only as Uncle Tom), uploaded to YouTube by HumanoidCableDreads. Anyone likely to offended by mass display of naked breasts or the simulated dashing of babies against a bedroom wall had better not look.