This 'divisive Spaghetti documentary' is part of the Black and Banned season at BFI Southbank. You can find out full details of the season here.
The following extract is from a Guardian article by Ashley Clark on Nick Pinkerton's Mondo Mondo season at New York's Anthology Film Archives cinema in 2012:
Today, when even the most mainstream fare is routinely deconstructed for its perceived ideological shortcomings, it’s bracing to watch something as fundamentally horrendous and complicated as Prosperi and Jacopetti’s mock-doc Farewell Uncle Tom (1972). It is simultaneously the least palatable and most fascinating film in the Mondo Mondo program. In it, a pair of contemporary journalists travel through time to the antebellum south to report on slavery, beginning with the nuts and bolts of slave transportation itself. The film was shot mostly in Haiti, where Jacopetti and Prosperi were treated as honored guests of dictator “Papa Doc” Duvalier, who afforded them diplomatic cars, the right to film anywhere on the island, a nightly chow down at the palace, and a limitless supply of extras – the often naked black bodies who pepper the film’s landscape with disturbing density. The film’s torrent of simulated – though graphic – rape and abuse renders it incredibly difficult to watch, and it appalled the late critic Roger Ebert, who wrote: “They have finally done it. Made the most disgusting, contemptuous insult to decency ever to masquerade as a documentary.” Pinkerton describes Farewell Uncle Tom, not inaccurately, as “a nasty movie made under unforgivably compromised circumstances involving a staggering amount of cognitive dissonance that puts a viewer in a terrible place.” Yet he’s equally keen to stump for its pioneering qualities. “It’s a completely unique work that marries the Italian epic tradition to the story of human chattel in the Americas. Neither of these aspects are mutually exclusive of the other. Maybe it should be locked away in a disused lavatory somewhere. I don’t think so.” The film is unsparing in its lampooning of venal, vainglorious slave-owners, and detailed about the economic basis of slavery in a way that no recent films on the subject – including Django Unchained and 12 Years a Slave – can match. If the purpose of art is to challenge and disturb, Farewell Uncle Tom must be considered a success.
Here (and above) is the trailer.
Today, when even the most mainstream fare is routinely deconstructed for its perceived ideological shortcomings, it’s bracing to watch something as fundamentally horrendous and complicated as Prosperi and Jacopetti’s mock-doc Farewell Uncle Tom (1972). It is simultaneously the least palatable and most fascinating film in the Mondo Mondo program. In it, a pair of contemporary journalists travel through time to the antebellum south to report on slavery, beginning with the nuts and bolts of slave transportation itself. The film was shot mostly in Haiti, where Jacopetti and Prosperi were treated as honored guests of dictator “Papa Doc” Duvalier, who afforded them diplomatic cars, the right to film anywhere on the island, a nightly chow down at the palace, and a limitless supply of extras – the often naked black bodies who pepper the film’s landscape with disturbing density. The film’s torrent of simulated – though graphic – rape and abuse renders it incredibly difficult to watch, and it appalled the late critic Roger Ebert, who wrote: “They have finally done it. Made the most disgusting, contemptuous insult to decency ever to masquerade as a documentary.” Pinkerton describes Farewell Uncle Tom, not inaccurately, as “a nasty movie made under unforgivably compromised circumstances involving a staggering amount of cognitive dissonance that puts a viewer in a terrible place.” Yet he’s equally keen to stump for its pioneering qualities. “It’s a completely unique work that marries the Italian epic tradition to the story of human chattel in the Americas. Neither of these aspects are mutually exclusive of the other. Maybe it should be locked away in a disused lavatory somewhere. I don’t think so.” The film is unsparing in its lampooning of venal, vainglorious slave-owners, and detailed about the economic basis of slavery in a way that no recent films on the subject – including Django Unchained and 12 Years a Slave – can match. If the purpose of art is to challenge and disturb, Farewell Uncle Tom must be considered a success.
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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